


Soundtrack

by mumuinc



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: A deeply embarrassing obsession with Taylor Swift, Alternate Universe, Drugs, Graphic depictions of abuse and influence of drugs, Kavinsky is his own warning, M/M, Referenced Child Abuse, Suicide Attempts, Yet another TRC gang makes a band, boys being creepy as fuck, sheer WTF-ness happening all over the place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-14 16:06:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 76,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8020342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan, Gansey and Noah make a band in high school AU. A bunch of random stuff happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Change

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Finding That Love Song](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7483212) by [LydiaStJames](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydiaStJames/pseuds/LydiaStJames). 



> So, I’m an impatient creature and the cliffhangers on Finding That Love Song are killing me, so I tried to write my own fanfic. What will follow in succeeding posts is complete word vomit of my (utterly unoriginal) TRC gang makes a band fanfic.
> 
> If my lack of personal imagination sounds particularly sorry, you haven’t checked the chapter titles and song choices I reference yet. Be forewarned that I like trashy pop tunes because I’m trash, and therefore my fanfic will be peppered with trashy pop references because that’s my life. Betas do not exist in my life because I am a solitary creature, so please ignore all my failings at English tenses.
> 
> Lastly, I love Taylor Swift. I just thought I’d point that out. c:

It began, like most hair-brained ideas conceived among teenage boys, in the middle of a Guitar Hero showdown.

Ronan Lynch bounced impatiently on the balls of his socked feet, mashing buttons on his plastic guitar controller’s neck as the screen dumped points and power-ups to Noah’s scoreboards. He kept missing notes at every 5 strums. And he wasn’t even that high. By contrast, Noah Czerny slumped on the fancy leather couch, his second, rolled but unlit joint stuck behind his left ear, as he tapped lazily at his controller. He hummed quietly to the music until the crescendo of the chorus.

“Hit me with your best shot!”

Aggressive swing of the guitar controller to grab the reigns of the game. Noah was still winning.

“Why don’t you hit me with your best shot.”

A few more lazy taps on Noah’s fret buttons, a languid swing to the guitar neck, and suddenly Ronan’s screen went red with a whammy bar stuck. Ronan was still mashing his controller’s fret buttons, frantically trying to regain control of his guitar, and it was at this point that Gansey chose to jump on to the back of the couch, sloshing the pitcher of soda he was carrying as he yelled,

“Fire Away!”

The screen faded to black. Noah stood smugly, tipping his blond head towards Ronan, trace of a smirk on thin pale lips. His uniform rumpled from rolling around the couch, face the color of paper, Noah looked like an abandoned kitten. The screen displayed their game statistics. Ronan had just lost a battle on the easiest song on the playlist. They didn’t even get to the second verse.

“Man, that’s the third time, Ronan,” Gansey grinned as he picked up the three empty glasses to refill their soda. “I can’t believe you can lose on that song. I thought you said you could play it in your sleep.”

The three boys had been playing Guitar Hero all afternoon in Gansey and Noah’s apartment at Monmouth Manufacturing, at Ronan’s request, procrastinating on homework, while waiting for the glare of the mid-afternoon Virginia sun to finally die down before they could finally start playing with the new skating ramps Ronan and Noah had hastily put up in the parking lot. Well, Gansey and Ronan had been playing. Noah had mostly been enjoying his joint until the soda ran out, and Gansey went to get more. Ronan had been on a steady losing streak since Noah took over Gansey’s controller.

Ronan scowled, lunging with grabby hands at the joint that Noah had just then decided to light. “I said I could play it in my sleep on a real guitar, man.” He waited for Noah to take a drag on the joint before demanding it over, and waved it around Gansey’s face. “We really ought to try this, man. Guitar Hero sucks.”

And that was the beginning of the first real sense of ambition for Ronan Lynch. Xbox controllers were abandoned in a heap at the end of the couch in the middle of Gansey’s room as the three boys drifted to the pile of Ronan's things on the corner, where he procured a tatty black Gibson. It was one of three he owned, the only one inherited from his father. He strummed a few notes idly from the song they had been playing on the game before Noah piped up.

“You guys think we can play this?” His tone was wistful, like he didn’t really think his friends would be interested. Noah, like Ronan, had little real ambition or interest in the schoolwork at their fancy private school, and constantly longed for something more interesting than spending their afternoons on homework. “Like, play real music?”

Gansey gestured for Ronan to pass the guitar, and hunted around for an amp to plug it to. He tested the strings again for tuning, and then started to play the opening bars of the first song that came to mind. The wistful smile on Noah’s face turned diabolical as he tapped a beat to match.

Ronan grinned. It wasn’t at the top of his list to play, but he knew this song. “I must confess that my loneliness / is killing me now! Don’t you know I still believe / that you will be here, so give me a sign.”

“Hit me baby one more time!”

When Ronan decided that being in a band in high school was the pinnacle of his ambitions, it didn’t exactly entail singing rock covers of Britney Spears songs. For one, he had no desire to sing anywhere he might be heard by anyone else he know, apart from his friends, or sing embarrassing pop tunes made popular in an era when he was still in diapers. For another, Gansey played shit guitar and didn’t know how to do a solo. The Gibson sounded like a cat in heat on the opening bars of Bed of Roses, and Ronan didn’t want to spoil the memory of his father playing the instrument with Gansey’s awful solos.

Noah, on the other hand, played a mean beat on the drums, and after days of cajoling, whining and needling, the two of them had finally convinced Gansey that the guitar was best left to Ronan, and Gansey could choose to play keyboards or bass, keyboards being the natural choice as it was easy to adapt the expensive piano lessons he had had as a child to play the instrument.

On the afternoon of the third week since the Guitar Hero game, Noah had finally finished setting up his flashy new drum set in the middle of Monmouth Manufacturing, the hulking abandoned brick building that served as Gansey and Noah’s apartment while studying at Aglionby Academy. Gansey had kindly cleared the sides of the set to put up his keyboard and a guitar stand for Ronan’s Gibson, and finally, a real band was taking shape.

“I still think we need to get a real vocalist,” was Ronan’s introduction as he slammed into the building, and stomped up the steps to the second floor, where their instruments were.

It was early evening and Noah and Gansey were on the couch once again, Gansey fiddling with the pizza delivery app on his phone, while Noah watched a video on Youtube. He looked up only when Ronan was a large, looming shadow in front of him.

“Dude, you’re blocking my light.” Noah’s elfin face scrunched up as he turned wide gray eyes to Ronan. He did not pause the video. “Also, you can totally keep singing Britney Spears. I mean, it’s not like we got anyone watching us yet.”

Ronan exhaled noisily. Unlike Noah, Ronan was not interested in playing covers forever. While it was fun to practice on covers, he had no desire to just be known for it. Especially not Britney Spears covers. WTF? Besides, it was hard to do guitars and sing at the same time.

“Anyway,” Noah continued, going back to his video, “I found who we really need.” He shoved his phone to Ronan’s face. It was still playing the video, which Ronan now recognized was an acoustic cover of Matchbox 22’s Bent. “He’s the one we need.”

“He” was a boy a few years younger than them, holding a beat-up acoustic guitar that was probably better thrown out with the garbage than on the slim, elegant hands. The blue eyes staring into the shaky camera were too large on a tanned, thin face framing a straight nose and a disarming smile. The boy’s ears stuck awkwardly under dusty blond hair. He was too thin to be considered cute, but even in the grainy video taken obviously with a shitty, ancient cellphone, the luminous blue eyes held a lot of soul, a disjointed match to the innocent voice singing about messed up, misguided love.

“Hey!” Gansey dropped his own phone and crowded around the other two boys. “That sounds nice!”

Ronan sniffed. The boy in the video sounded a bit too country. Didn’t sound like his balls had dropped yet either: he sounded like a girl. A cursory check of the video’s metadata showed it was taken two years ago, so the boy in it would probably be about their age now, hopefully with a better cellphone. “He’s okay. If this was two years ago, he probably sounds completely different now. How do you know he’s even local?” He stopped the video and tried to check out the account of the stranger (lilyblue2014) who uploaded it, but there were no others. There was no name or description on the video either.

“Accent, man,” Noah took his phone back and started fiddling some more with the Youtube app. “Sounds exactly like the public school boys on Main Street.” He brought the video back to the start, where the boy was talking in the most hilariously twangy Henrietta accent. He obviously wasn’t taking the video, or even wanted to take it because he was whining at whoever was holding the cellphone to stop taking the video. In the background, they could hear the static hiss of a second voice, a girl’s voice, laughing. They both sounded like hicks.

Ronan played the video over again, listening intently. It wasn’t even the full length of the song, just the first verse and the chorus before the boy and whoever was taking the video collapsed back into laughter. He played it again a third time. Noah grinned at them expectantly.

“Well? Well? He’s good, right?”

Before Ronan could answer, Gansey grabbed Noah’s phone and paused the video and squinted. “Isn’t that the bus stop on Main Street? The one near Mountain View High School?”

 

* * *

 

In true stalker form, Gansey and Noah were not letting go of their dream vocalist. Every after school that spring, just before driving back to Monmouth to play sessions and do homework, the three boys spent at least thirty minutes at crawling speed on Main Street to watch the stream of the public school children let out from Mountain View High, hoping to get a glimpse of Dusty Hair Blue Eyes. It was a futile search: half the school’s boys population was of boys with dusty hair, as they loitered near the bus stop or climbed on to bicycles. No one had awkward ears or the charming smile.

The boys got better at their instruments: Noah played like a demon on drums, Gansey’s fingers wrought drama and melancholy on ballads, and fast-paced electronic excitement on dance tunes. Ronan did not sing, but by the end of the school term, the Gibson could wail like a banshee on his best rock covers. It was the most excitement and magic any fifteen-year-old could have. It would not last.

At the end of that summer, while Noah shipped off to New York with his family, and Gansey drove back to DC, and Ronan spent his afternoons at The Barns, his father was murdered in their front yard. The image of Niall Lynch’s bloody, battered body never left Ronan, except when smothered in the sound of screeching cars racing in the night, and drowned at the bottom of illegally purchased whiskey bottles. Gansey drove back from DC that weekend, discovered Niall Lynch’s car half fallen into a ditch just off the highway exit to Henrietta, with Ronan half-naked, humongous black monstrosity of a fresh tattoo gleaming on his back, completely and utterly smashed, and wailing behind the wheel of the stalled car. He wasn’t even legal to own a driver’s license.

There was no going back to Singer’s Falls after the weekend. Aurora Lynch had slipped into a catatonic state two days after her husband’s death, and Ronan’s older brother, Declan, had made the heavy decision to move her to assisted living, and the three Lynch brothers into the Aglionby dorms. Ronan stormed off the dorms the same day he was moved in and demanded to live in Monmouth with Gansey, and when he didn’t get his way, he drank his body weight in alcohol and slit his wrists in his dorm room shower and waited to die. His roommate had just been back and the boy was scarred for life at the sight of blood and vomit, but Ronan Lynch would not only live another day but also get kicked out of his dorm and move to Monmouth, just as he designed.

By the time Noah came back to Monmouth for the start of the fall term, Ronan’s self-destruction was almost complete. The tattoo had mostly healed, the lacerations on his wrists beginning to scar and he covered them with half-bitten leather bands, and Ronan had Gansey shave off his black, chin-length curls. On their first day of school, Ronan Lynch had transformed from Aglionby tennis star and guitar god into the Henrietta resident delinquent and car thief, stealing that same night into Singer’s Falls to sneak off with his father’s BMW. The last vestige of a childhood that was now well and truly gone.

There was no more music to be had. Ronan had left the Gibson at the Barns, where the rest of his life hung in tatters, and even when Gansey had offered to buy him a new guitar, he had preferred vandalism, petty crime and drag racing. Noah was the most despondent.

“Gansey, we need to do something!” was a common urgent refrain, uttered only late in the night or the early morning, and only when Ronan was out or was too drunk to comprehend.

And for once in his life, Richard Campbell Gansey III did not have the answer.


	2. Wildest Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Ronan and Noah are creepy stalkers.

It was not until the middle of the fall term that things finally changed.

Prelim exams were looming, but like Ronan, Noah could no longer be bothered to study. To begin with, he had never been anything like Gansey, who actually gave a shit about his education. Noah preferred to coast the edges of acceptable grades and compensate with a lot of extra-curriculars that had more to do with leisure than his future as a brain-damaged accountant. He had made the swim team that year and spent most mornings in the Aglionby pool to loosen limbs and practice his freestyle (building muscle mass didn’t hurt, because Noah was the equivalent of a stick insect among bullfrogs). Gansey usually accompanied him in his morning laps for crew practice but opted out for the week in favor of studying for the exams. He thought that was extremely rude of Gansey, and his laps had suffered from the general annoyance at having forced himself to wake up early to even do the laps alone.

It was too early for any student in Aglionby to be loitering near the pools, but when Noah finally climbed out, Ronan, his uniform rumpled, barefoot with his khakis damp but folded messily to avoid the chlorine water, tie an abomination, was there, hand outstretched with Noah’s towel. It was almost sweet if Ronan didn’t look like he’d been to hell and back. His tattoo curved spiky hooks up the collar of his uniform shirt, his sleeves rolled up and angry red scars on his wrists barely hidden by his leather bands. His eyes were bloodshot, lip curled in a perpetual scowl.

Noah wrinkled his nose, but took the towel and began to vigorously rub down his skinny legs. Ronan was watching him with glassy eyes that glowed in the reflected pale light from the swimming pool.

“Man, you stunk up my towel,” was all he said when Ronan finally looked away. He realized that he had never told Ronan about making the swim team, so it was a funny thought that his friend would be here now.

Ronan snorted, picked up his boots, which he had discarded haphazardly on one of the plastic benches lining the pool. “Excuse you, I’m not drunk.”

A small quirk of the lips was Noah’s answer. Ronan didn’t smell drunk, but he looked it. In fact, he looked completely hung over. “I’m just glad you’re in school today. Declan’s starting to talk to people.” He inclined his head as if to indicate exactly what kind of people Declan had been talking to, his damp blond hair plastering over his face and needing to be wiped off and vigorously toweled down as well.

Ronan splashed the water that licked the edges of the pool with his toes. “Fuck Declan.” There was no venom in his voice. Ronan just sounded tired. Noah thought he could understand but he realized he probably couldn’t; after all, his parents were still alive and he wasn’t exiled from his home.

Instead, he smiled again and wrapped the damp towel around his waist. “I’m going to shower.”

He didn’t wait to see if Ronan would follow him into the gym locker and shower rooms. There was a pile of clean towels at a bench in the locker room. It probably belonged to the crew team; they were the only ones who left shit hanging out in the gym shower instead of keeping their crap inside individual lockers. Noah decided he would have to tell Gansey, who was the captain of the crew team, that his boys needed to be more responsible, but today was not going to be that day, because he didn’t have another towel in his locker and so he swiped a clean one from the pile. Ronan strolled in to the room, still barefoot and carrying his boots. The locker room was empty, but Noah heard the muffled sound of the gym doors open and close, probably to admit one of the employees, who cleaned up the pools before 7AM. He heard shuffling on a different row of lockers from where he stood in front of his own to collect his clothes, and a minute later, someone’s cheap radio was turned on, static crackling over the sound of popular music.

Noah didn’t like to shower with employees around; he didn’t much like doing anything with anyone around, and Ronan was not at all different as he motioned silently for the two of them to just beat it. He supposed he could just put on some clothes and have Ronan drive him back to Monmouth so he could bathe and get changed at home and maybe get back to school by second period, but just then the sound of rushing water dispelled the idea of an employee and Ronan’s diabolical grin meant a prank was about to be set in motion. Probably on the poor unsuspecting freshman daring to use the showers during Noah’s swim alone time.

Ronan grabbed his wrist and the two of them crept quietly towards the shower stalls, toiletries, clean towels and shoes forgotten. The student in the stalls was probably cold-blooded: steam rose in copious amounts and clouded the shower room in a damp, sticky heat. Noah wasn’t sure if this kid was showering or flaying himself alive. He saw Ronan start to move towards the fire alarm, fingers twitching with glee as he pointed to the bench in front of the stall, where the boy’s dirty clothes were neatly folded, along with a threadbare white towel that had seen better days. Noah winked back at his friend, motioning an abortive gesture as he slowly slid the pile of clothing and towel off the bench and into his arms.

He sneaked a quick look at the boy in the showers who had his back turned to the bench. The boy was tall, almost as tall as Ronan, who was a good head taller than Noah, probably not a freshman, white with an uneven tan, and even in the hazy air in the showers, he could make out scars and bruises running along the boy’s pale, freckled back all the way down to his butt and the backs of his tanned legs. Noah couldn’t decide if the other boy was badass or a loser, probably a loser judging from the sharp jut of shoulder blades on the skinny back and the knobby knees that punctuated too long and too thin legs, but he wasn’t going to risk getting caught in case this was one of Kavinsky’s punks and decided to beat him up for stealing his clothes and generally participating in Ronan Lynch levels of havoc and mayhem. He crept out of view from the shower stall to join Ronan by the fire alarm, boy’s clothes in hand, and was about to whisper back to pull the alarm, when the boy in the shower began to sing to the distant tune on the cheap radio.

_He’s so tall and handsome as hell_  
_He’s so bad but he does it so well_  
_I can see the end as it begins  
_ _My one condition is_

Ronan almost skidded and crashed on the bench as he bent his long body to frantically try to catch a glimpse of the boy in the shower. Panicking, Noah dropped the bundle of fabric in his arms and grabbed Ronan’s sweater and dragged him out back into the locker room. Both of them were gasping loudly, but it didn’t seem like shower boy ever heard them.

“Into the locker, shithead!” Ronan whispered savagely, pushing Noah into his own locker, before stuffing himself inside with Noah. The fit was unbearable: Noah realized he was a small, skinny boy, but Ronan was tall, muscular, and his breath felt hot on Noah’s bare back. Neither of them could catch their breaths, even with both their noses stuck on the narrow slots of the locker door.

Outside, the boy in the shower had apparently finished. He stopped singing, muttered an annoyed “Damn!” probably when he found his clothes and towel on the floor. He drifted back into the locker room; somehow his locker was directly in front of Noah’s. He had wrapped the dirty towel around his waist as he fumbled to open the lock. And then he started to sing again.

_You’ll see me in hindsight_  
_Tangled up with you all night_  
 _Burning it down_  
 _Someday when you leave me_  
 _I bet these memories_  
 _Follow you around_

“Fuck,” Ronan hissed. His hand, on Noah’s shoulder was trembling as the two of them watched shower boy peel off his towel, pull on a nasty scrap of cloth that could pass as boxers, before shaking out his damp, blond hair. Ronan jerked back as the boy turned from his locker door, holding out his khakis.

Noah’s eyes went round as shower boy suddenly stopped singing, looked up from where he was smoothing out his khakis, eyes darting like a cornered animal, casting about warily. His narrow blue eyes were nervously eyeing the corner of the stand of lockers on Noah’s side. His movements jerky, probably thinking the same thing as Noah that he didn’t want to dress his skinny ass when the jocks start milling in to the gym lockers. He dressed quickly, slim, elegant hands awkwardly wiping his threadbare towel to his pinched face, freckled skin pulling taut over delicate cheekbones, before he grabbed his shoes, tossed his towel and damp dirty clothes into his locker, and slammed it shut, and ran, barefoot, out of the locker room.

Ronan exhaled shakily. He was pressed at the back of the locker, somehow managing to climb over Noah in the scuffle to hide. His eyes, usually glassy from hangover or the general deadness he felt inside, were round and glowing blue in the gloom of the locker and staring at Noah like it was the first time he had seen him. Noah stared back. Both boys scarcely took a breath before Ronan crashed his lips and teeth to Noah’s face. For a searing moment, Noah kissed back, all teeth and tongue. He could taste the faintest trace of cloves and just the barest hint of acid lingering in the roof of Ronan’s mouth. And then he was pulling back.

Ronan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, an awkward boyish gesture that seemed impossible to do in the cramped space of the locker. His eyes were still wide, as if he had seen a ghost.

Noah quirked a smile as he pushed the locker door open and stepped out. His mind was still on the shower boy. It was him. Vaguely, he could feel frustration building up Ronan’s limbs, before he sprang out of the locker, arms still shaking, legs cramped, glare murderous.

“Fuck you, we’re not talking about that ever again.”

Noah’s smile widened as he grabbed his abandoned towel and finally, his uniform and a clean change of underwear. “You kiss like a fish, Lynch.”

With a smug tip of his head, Noah slung his towel over his shoulder and ambled towards the shower, leaving Ronan alone, barefoot and still shaking, in the locker room.

It was him. The boy in the Youtube video. He went to Aglionby. Noah’s day suddenly got immensely better.

 

* * *

 

Ronan did not make it to first or second period. But by third period World History, Gansey finally found his friend sitting in the back of the classroom, uniform an obscene mockery of the school dress code, booted feet propped up the chair in front of his. Gansey swept in next to him, textbook and notes out, ready for class. Ronan looked around in disinterest. They were early, none of their classmates or their teacher had made it to class just yet, as the first bell had only just rung.

“This shit is boring.”

Ronan pulled his feet down and started to get up, but Gansey motioned for him to stay. It was the first time, since his father’s death, that Ronan had actually bothered to show up for class. His teachers and the school administration had given him quite a bit of leeway following Niall’s death, but a full month of truancy and rumors of brushes with the law, had not done Ronan any favors, and Gansey was determined to try to wrangle a sense of normalcy back into his friend’s life. “I think I met our singer.”

That made the other boy pause, head swiveled mechanically to face Gansey. Ronan’s eyes were narrowed, wary. “You mean the kid from the video?”

Gansey blinked. For a moment, he had no idea what Ronan was talking about. And then the memory clicked; the Youtube video that the three of them had watched all those months ago, that Ronan had continued to watch over and over. The kid Gansey and Noah and Ronan had tried to find unsuccessfully in the spring before the days leading up to the summer of hell. Oh, that video.

“No,” he smiled easily, settling into his chair. At least Ronan didn’t look like he was going to rush out of the classroom any more. “I don’t think Noah and I ever found that boy. We tried asking around his school before summer started. Doesn’t look like he goes to Mountain View anymore.” He paused, tapped a pen on Ronan’s desk when the other boy started to lose interest. “But I found a different one. I think she’s going to be perfect.”

Ronan moved as if to get up and sweep Gansey’s hand away from his desk to make his getaway, but just then, the second bell rang and all of the other students in their class started to pour in. The narrowed eyes got even narrower, Ronan’s posture suddenly stiffening as he dropped back into his chair. He turned back to Gansey, expression poisonous.

“Did Noah talk to you this morning?”

Gansey opened his mouth to answer, but their teacher had already swept into the room and started the lecture. It wouldn’t look good if he talked over the lecture, especially this close to prelims, and Gansey was nothing if not polite and well-behaved. He turned his attention away from Ronan to start taking down notes, when the other boy tapped a finger at the edge of his desk. He looked as if struggling to decide on something before his jaw set and he looked Gansey in the eye.

“That kid goes here. The one in the video. He’s the one we need.”

And then Ronan stood up and decided that World History wasn’t worth his time at all. Gansey turned to stare after Ronan’s retreating figure, but there was nothing else to do, and prelims loomed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title and lyrics in this chapter are from Wildest Dreams, by Taylor Swift.


	3. I Knew You Were Trouble.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Adam hotwires Ronan's car.

There was no further discussion of music after that morning. Gansey had apparently forgotten that he had brought up the subject in their World History class. Noah was missing in action for a few days (or Ronan had probably just not been home whenever Noah was there). It turned out that Noah had spent the rest of the week with his own classmates, to cram for his prelims. Noah was in his senior year, and shared no classes with either of his roommates. Ronan, meanwhile, continued to skip school, get into fights, and just randomly get into trouble. If he had no aspirations for his life before the summer, his father’s death gave Ronan a death wish that wouldn’t quit and he looked for it in the explosive adrenaline of street racing and more alcohol.

By Thursday, Gansey had had to haul him up to the hospital again to get his stomach pumped to avoid alcohol poisoning. Declan and Matthew had been waiting there with dark, somber expressions that Ronan could not shake, but would not deign to meet. He spent the night at the hospital, his exhausted brothers sleeping on chairs. Gansey had threatened to chain him to the hospital bed if he tried to sneak away, but he awoke in the gray dawn of Friday with an itch that wouldn’t die down. It was easy to tiptoe past Declan, who was curled on a couch next to the door, his face dour even in sleep. Ronan paused momentarily to ruffle Matthew’s hair. It was a little harder not to feel a twinge of guilt for worrying his happy-go-lucky younger brother.

He had made it out the building in nothing but the drab gray hospital gown, but it was at the parking lot that he realized he didn’t have a car (he had been unconscious when Gansey had found him and brought him to the hospital), and Gansey was standing there in the parking lot, holding a cup of cheap vending machine coffee. He was talking to someone whose back was turned to Ronan. There was something oddly familiar about this person. Ronan stomped towards where they stood, next to Gansey’s car, a furiously orange 1973 Camaro that Gansey had nicknamed the Pig.

His friend’s face broke into a smile as he approached. Gansey in the early hours of morning, without his contact lenses, or his disgustingly preppy polo shirts in pastel shades, was like a shadow of himself, as gray as the wet autumn dawn, brown hair a mess, wire-framed glasses making him seem ancient beyond his years. Ronan felt a fierce pang of fondness for his friend. He felt as if he had been through hell and back in the past few months and Gansey had been there to pick up the pieces when Ronan had never wanted anything more than to continue falling apart.

“Hey, you’re not supposed to be out of your room yet,” Gansey smiled even as the rebuke left his lips.

Ronan snorted. “I’m bored. When are we going home?”

It was at this moment that whoever Gansey was talking to decided to turn to look at him. Ronan felt as if he was in the BMW careening through the night in a headlong collision course with a truck or a train and a surefire way to die.

It was the boy in the gym shower room, the boy in the video. It was different, looking at him up close, without the locker door’s tiny slots to obscure his view, or the grain of an ancient cellphone video. Ronan thought he had looked his fill when he and Noah had spied on this boy in the shower room, but it seemed every time Ronan looked, there was something different to see, something more to appreciate. He didn’t know what it was, whether the constant knit of pale eyebrows over deep-set eyes, the elegant planes of tan skin over finely carved cheekbones, or the pale lips that seemed perpetually downturned, lending a wounded animal’s expression to the tired, pinched face. There was always something that drew him in. Something more. Something Ronan hadn’t dared to realize, had not dared to think about, but had looked at in his phone, in his mind, over and over again.

The boy wore a bemused expression on his oddly elegant face. The smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks made him look as if he was years younger than how Gansey looked, than how Ronan felt.

Gansey’s smile widened. “Oh, I forgot, this is Adam Parrish. I don’t know if you know him, he goes to school with us.” Gansey gestured at Adam’s dirty threadbare t-shirt and the grease-streaked coveralls zipped halfway up to his sternum. Ronan thought he looked nothing like any of the boys that went to school with them. “He helped me with my car when I was on my way back here. The Pig broke down, and Adam knows quite a bit about cars. Parrish, this is Ronan Lynch, one of my roommates.”

Parrish ran a nervous hand through his unevenly cut mop of dusty blond hair, seeming to consider extending a hand to Ronan to shake but then thought the better of it. He, his eyebrows and his hair looked exactly the same color. Only his eyes, dark and hooded, a stormy blue, in the early morning, were a different color from the rest of him. Even his drab gray t-shirt and coveralls looked the same color. Ronan found it vaguely disturbing.

“I work as a mechanic in a garage just outside town. I think I remember you, we have Latin together.” His voice was soft and sounded nothing like the twangy thirteen-year-old in the video. The corners of his downturned lips lifted minutely in the barest hint of a smile.

Ronan didn’t remember that he had any fine-boned, freckle-faced charity case in any of his classes, but he could be mistaken since he had not been to any of them except on the first day. Instead, his mind flashed back to the sound of Parrish’s voice singing Wildest Dreams in the shower room, to long, pale legs dotted with scars and bruises, flushed skin pink from the heat of the shower water, and freckles everywhere, like an explosion of stars on the galaxy of the pale skin of his back, and he felt his ears grow warm despite the cold morning air. He stood in his gown, not talking, glowering at Parrish until the other boy dropped his gaze and turned back to Gansey, who smiled and finished his coffee, then locked his car and started towards Ronan, towards the hospital entrance. Parrish stood rooted next to the Camaro, unsure if he was going to follow.

“Well, let’s just go get you checked out,” Gansey said. “Adam, can you wait out for a little while? I can get you to school; you said you shower at the gym before class? I might pull in some laps if I can find Noah there.”

Ronan snorted again, remembering that morning. The morning he and Noah had intended to prank Parrish not knowing who he was, and ended up getting punked themselves the moment Parrish opened his mouth to sing. Ronan both wanted to erase the memory of the feelings that voice evoked, and wallow in it. He remembered Gansey and Noah both talking about restarting their band. They just needed a vocalist.

“I want to go home.”

Gansey heaved a long-suffering sigh as he led him back to the hospital room to wake Declan and Matthew, and to speak to the nurses to check Ronan out. “Yes child, you’re going home. And you’re going to stay home if I have to chain you up there myself.”

* * *

 

Ronan did not stay at home. After thanking his brothers for handling the insurance and paperwork, Gansey had first dropped Ronan off to Monmouth Manufacturing, before rushing off for crew practice and to bring Parrish to school. The apartment was deserted. It didn’t look like Noah had been around throughout Ronan’s night at the hospital. He tried to go back to sleep, but it was impossible the moment the morning sun hit the headboard of his bed. After an hour of tossing and turning in bed, he got up, washed himself (he smelled like gasoline and his own puke, and it was disgusting and it made him wonder whether the nurses had ever bothered to clean up his carcass once he was admitted the previous night), and managed to choke down some cereal.

By 2 o’clock, he was feeling a bit more himself, and he even shaved the multi-day shadow he had going to look slightly less disreputable than he usually did. Gansey had had enough foresight before he left Monmouth for school to confiscate the keys to the BMW, but Ronan would be damned if he was going to wait up for either of his roommates to come home to drive him around town. His nerves itched with boredom, and he slammed out of Monmouth fully intending to walk around if he had to.

It turned out he didn’t have to. He was just a few hundred meters past the warehouse parking lot when he spotted a familiar figure in gray coveralls pedaling his direction, on a squeaky, pathetically rusted bike.

“Hey Parrish!”

The bicycle slowed to a halt just in front of him, and Adam Parrish dismounted, awkwardly running a freckled hand through his dusty hair. He looked adorably rumpled with his gray coveralls tied around his waist. Ronan made a point not to stare. “Hey Lynch. I thought you were supposed to be resting. Gansey said—“

Ronan scowled. “Fuck Gansey, I’m bored.” He smiled unpleasantly when Parrish frowned. There was something in that frown that kept Ronan smiling, even though he wanted to wipe that look off the other boy’s face. “Hey listen, man, do you know how to hotwire a car?”

Large baby blue eyes widened in surprise at the forwardness of his request. Ronan supposed it wasn’t everyday some jerk this kid met asked about hotwiring a car but Ronan Lynch was nothing if not direct about everything he wanted. Well, some things he wanted. “I—I don’t—“

“Come on, man, you work with cars and shit, right? I’m sure you can hotwire my car. I need to get out of here, man. I’m dying.” Ronan put a hand up to scratch the back of his head and Parrish almost jumped back, hands in a vague position in front of his chest, as if warding Ronan away.

“Um, I really don’t think you should be driving out to anywhere without your friends in this condition,” he stammered, hands still up, wary.

Ronan snorted. “The fuck? I don’t need a nanny. I just need to get out of here. Look, I’ll pay you, all right?”

At this, Parrish’s frown deepened, his lip curled. “I don’t need your money—“

Ronan waved off the other boy’s annoyance dismissively. “Whatever, man. Can you fix my car up or what?” The other boy was still eyeing him suspiciously, and he sighed. “Look, I’ll give you a lift to wherever you’re going if you start my car.”

There was a split second of sudden insight in the other boy’s eyes before they narrowed and the wary look was back. Parrish’s lip curled in a sneer. “I don’t need your ride, man. Show me where’s your car.”

It was lucky that Ronan had been so smashed the previous night that he forgot to lock his car. Adam put his bike down on the side of the building and made short work of the BMW’s wiring, and before long, it was up and running like Gansey hadn’t hidden the keys after all. Ronan stared at the other boy as he hauled himself up. He’d been humming while he worked. Ronan couldn’t forget how that voice had sounded. Parrish no longer sounded like his pitchy thirteen-year-old self. Wildest Dreams had been soft, and husky, like a secret whispered directly into his ears, and a lot of things that made Ronan uncomfortable, even though objectively Adam’s voice sounded good. His voice still echoed inside his head.

“So do you need a ride or what?”

Parrish frowned at him again as he wiped the dirt off his hands unsuccessfully on the front of his coveralls. All he did was smear more dirt everywhere. “I don’t need—“

Ronan sighed impatiently. This was hard. Talking to people was hard. Talking to this stupid, freckle-faced boy with the soft, husky voice was hard. “I’m going to town to get a new guitar. We’re in a band, you know, Gansey and Noah and I.” Adam blinked stupidly at him, not quite understanding what he was saying. Ronan forged on. “I noticed you were singing. Just now, while you worked.”

The frown deepened even more, Parrish didn’t answer. Ronan glanced down at him. Even when he was frowning, he wasn’t bad-looking either.

“And in the gym, in the showers.” The other boy’s mouth opened and closed and opened again. Ronan continued to talk. “Yeah, that was me and Noah, last Monday. We, err, forgot something, after swim practice.”

There was an almost inaudible sigh. Ronan thought it was a sigh of relief that Adam wasn’t imagining ghosts in the Aglionby shower rooms. He wasn’t going to admit that he enjoyed watching Adam in the shower and getting dressed, while he was pressed up inside a locker with Noah.

“Oh, ok, I thought it was…” Adam trailed off and didn’t continue on that line of thought. And then he straightened and started for his bike. “Well, if that’s all then—“

“We want you to be in our band as our singer,” Ronan blurted out before he could stop himself.

Parrish stopped walking, turned back slowly to face him. There was a strange faraway expression on his face, almost wistful. It was there for only a split second before he shook himself and tipped his head. “Sorry, man, I can’t. I have to work.”

Ronan rolled his eyes. How hard to get was this guy going to play before he agreed? What a little shit. “Come on man, it’s not like we’re gonna be playing everyday. It’s just for fun.”

Parrish opened his mouth to reply, but whatever he had been about to say was drowned out by the roar of engine as the Camaro rolled into the Monmouth parking lot, and Gansey, Noah and a third stranger (where the hell do his friends manage to dredge up these charity cases?), a girl dressed like a lampshade, jumped out of the car. Noah bounced towards the two of them, eyes shining.

“Ronan! We have a lead singer now!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, skinny legs breaking into a running jump to launch himself on Ronan’s back, legs wrapping around Ronan’s waist, arms around his neck, a piggyback ride. Even with the muscle building for swimming, Noah weighed next to nothing on Ronan’s back.

Ronan glanced back to the Camaro, where Gansey and the girl walked towards them with just a little less enthusiasm than Noah had. He looked back and Adam Parrish was now on his bike. Adam shot a look towards Gansey, eyes narrowing again, before looking back at Ronan and inclined his head, a small half-smile playing on thin lips.

“Doesn’t look like you’ll be needing me after all.” The smile he flashed Ronan was wistful, almost sad, and fleeting, before drawing back again into that wary stare. “See you around, Lynch.” He didn’t wait for Gansey or the girl to be within earshot and pedaled away without a second glance.

Noah jumped off Ronan’s back finally when Adam was out of earshot. The knowing smile on his face made Ronan want to break things. “Oh, looks like trouble…”

Ronan snorted derisively just as Gansey and their new visitor got up to them. He was suddenly in no mood to talk to anyone, but Gansey had clapped a hand at his shoulder, and prevented him from making a quick getaway into the BMW’s open door.

“I can’t believe Parrish hotwired your car,” Gansey said, ruefully shaking his head before he fished into the pockets of his chinos and pressed Ronan’s car keys into his hand. “Anyway, I told you before, I’ve found our singer.” Gansey grinned brightly as he gestured at the girl, who was a full foot shorter than Ronan that he had to look down to check the scowl on her face. Her purple lampshade dress was completely at odds with the stern expression she wore as she held out her hand to Ronan. Ronan stared at her outstretched hand, lip curling, and pointedly ignored her attempt at a handshake.

“Blue Sargent.” Her speaking voice sounded familiar too, although Ronan couldn’t place where. She scowled up at him and then peered behind his back. “Why was that guy here?”

Noah blinked at Blue. “You know him?” He turned to Ronan accusingly. “Wait, you know him too?”

Blue snorted. “Yeah, everyone knows Adam Parrish. Tall skinny, cute guy, worked illegally since he was thirteen. He probably works legally now, I suppose? (Child labor and all that.) Freckles. Everyone at my school used to call him Pretty Boy Parrish. His parents pulled him out of our school mid-year last year. We all thought he moved or was dead or something.”

Gansey and Noah gasped dramatically. Clearly this was news. Ronan couldn’t care less. All he wanted now was to drive off after Parrish and tell him to be in his band, this tiny maggot of a girl be damned, and then maybe go to town and buy the new guitar he been meaning to get since the day started. But Blue wasn’t done with her story.

“Think his mom found this video of him singing on Youtube, and pulled him out. I may have had a hand in recording and uploading that shit.” She shook her head, as if trying to brush off any responsibility she may have indirectly felt at Adam Parrish’s school problems. “I can’t believe he’s still here. What a little shit.”

“Well, so how exactly do you know him?” Noah asked pointedly.

Blue’s smile was as unpleasant as the empty feeling in Ronan’s stomach. “We used to date.”

 

 

Gansey wasn’t kidding when he said Blue’s voice was the shit. Ronan thought he knew enough about music to see talent when it was in front of him, and Blue was plenty talented as she wailed Smells Like Teen Spirit to the beat Noah worked on his drums. Her voice transitioned smoothly from husky female vocals into scratchy, hoarse screams, and when Teen Spirit ended, she proceeded to pull out the bass guitar she had dumped in the trunk of Gansey’s car and pulled the meanest bass riff this side of the Atlantic. Ronan felt he wasn’t an easy guy to impress, but Blue was thoroughly impressing the shit out of him with the least amount of effort.

There was just one little problem.

He still wanted Parrish in the band. His band.

It was an almost irrational need. Objectively, Blue was probably as good as, if not better, than Parrish as a singer, not only because her vocal range was so impressive, but also because she played bass. Ronan didn’t know if Parrish knew how to play any other instrument besides guitar, and the band didn’t really need any more guitars. But there was something Ronan couldn’t quite understand that left a bitter lick of disappointment in his mouth has Gansey and Noah enthusiastically made music with Blue. And it didn’t have anything to do with Blue at all.

When Ronan was ten, his father had stuck him and Declan in an Irish song and dance competition. The two of them had to learn how to play a variety of folk instruments, and folk dances. Ronan hadn’t been too impressed with the need for teamwork with his sulky older brother, and he had whined and complained and thrown tantrums so that his dad would pull out Declan so Ronan could join the competitions by himself, all to no avail. This was a little like the reverse. He thought that on some weird level, that he had almost gotten Parrish to agree, almost gotten him to stay, if Noah and Gansey and Blue had not shown up.

Now, there was no way he would probably get what he wanted. From the guarded looks Parrish had thrown Gansey and Blue that afternoon, it was obvious there was still plenty of bad blood between the two exes, even though Ronan had no idea how long Blue and Adam had dated for that amount of animosity to be between them, and as Ronan’s interest in putting up the band grew again, there was no way that type of bad blood would ever work out. Blue, for her part, had at least stopped talking about Parrish after admitting they dated, and they jammed together into the early evening, until Blue had to leave for her own part-time job at Nino’s Pizzeria.

And then, the four of them piled into Gansey’s car to drive Blue to Nino’s and gorge on pizza and iced tea for the rest of the evening. It was almost a good night.

 

* * *

 

That night, as Ronan lay in bed in the darkness, still restless from the excitement of the day, he finally thought to himself,

_Maybe it’s the freckles._

And he smiled before he closed his eyes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, welcome rest at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you haven’t realized it yet, all the chapter titles are Taylor Swift song titles. Yes, it’s a thing.


	4. Bad Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which the band finally takes shape.

The week following his first meeting with Richard Gansey and his friends, Adam had continued to go to school, keeping his head down, and watching longingly at the three whenever he spotted them on campus. He wasn’t sure exactly what his place was with them, but Gansey made a point to talk to him before and after whatever classes they shared. He almost felt that they were going to be his friends, these three kings of Aglionby, and Adam desperately wanted to be part of their pack. Richard C. Gansey III was everything Adam Parrish aspired to be, probably would never be, if appearances were to be an indication. Adam had spent many days staring enviously at Gansey’s impeccable chinos, his Italian-crafted white dress shirt under the tailored blazer. He had looked at Ronan and Noah’s pristine, perfectly fitting Aglionby sweaters, even though both boys had always worn their uniforms in flagrant displays of disdain for school authority, and he fumbled unconsciously with a loose thread on his second-hand one. Sometimes, Adam Parrish just could not be comfortable in his uniform, in his own skin. **  
**

_One day, one day I’ll be like that. I’ll be like them._

But if Gansey or his friends ever noticed Adam’s awkwardness, none of them ever mentioned it. They talked and were generally friendly enough (even Ronan Lynch talked with his mouth instead of his fists lately), that Adam eventually allowed himself to drift closer, and one morning, a week after the end of their prelims, he found himself sitting next to Gansey and Ronan Lynch in their English class, just as their teacher, Mr. Milo, started handing back their graded essay exam papers. Adam grabbed his exam paper with clammy hands, heart full of dread, almost mortally afraid to check his grade. This was first period and the first grade he was getting. It was going to dictate how life in Aglionby would progress if he held himself together well. If he was good enough.

A brief whistle of delight erupted from the chair to his right. It seemed Gansey and Ronan had gotten their papers as well. Lynch, in particular looked savagely pleased with the C+ scrawled in large red print at the top of his paper. Adam’s eyes widened. He hadn’t even known Lynch had shown up for prelims, but even then, C+ was not a good grade to get in a school that demanded a minimum grade of B to continue enrollment. With a sinking feeling, Adam supposed it didn’t really matter for someone like Ronan Lynch to get a grade like he did. He was probably rich enough not to care about minimum grades.

Gansey was smiling pleasantly at his A- as well. He turned to Adam. “What’d you get, Parrish?”

Adam’s hand shook as he pulled the test paper from between the pages of the thick textbook. He’d stuffed it in there hurriedly so he wouldn’t have to think too much… “Uh. A+, I guess.”

And as it turned out, Adam did get an A+ and topped the exams, not just in English, but in all of the classes he took, except in Latin. Funnily enough, even though Ronan Lynch almost never showed up to class from the start of the term until their first exam, he had gotten the top grade, and the smug grin he shot in Adam’s direction meant Adam was never going to be able to challenge his reign as the king of Latin. He felt relieved at the end of the week, holding all of his graded papers, peppered with A’s and A+’s. It was going to be worth it, all of this. The hours of studying, the three jobs he took to finance his schooling…

“Hey.”

He looked up from the frog he was dissecting and put his scalpel down after gently prodding the skin open to expose its organs. Ronan shoved the toe of his boot on the leg of Adam’s stool. Since they met and Ronan started showing up to class again, the two of them had somehow become laboratory partners in Biology, one of the few classes they did not share with Gansey, who was taking Environmental Sciences. On Ronan’s side of the table, the other boy’s dissected frog looked like road kill and the guts threatened to splatter over to Adam’s side of the lab table.

He reached for a paper towel at the corner of the table and silently wiped at the gore. Ronan looked a bit too happy holding the scalpel over the frog.

“We’re going to have a session this afternoon,” he said as he poked at the frog’s heart with his scalpel. Adam tried not to look at the delighted way with which Ronan severed muscles and drained slime. It was vaguely disturbing. “Wanna come?”

Adam stole a look at the other boy’s face from beneath dusty eyelashes. He didn’t know if Ronan had been sincere when he first asked Adam to join his band over three weeks ago. He thought that maybe it was a prank that these rich boys were playing: draw the unpopular charity case in, make him feel like a king, and then slam his pasty face up a locker door. Adam had already dealt with a lot of that in junior high, when he had had twice as many bruises up his face than even he cared to put up with, and he had no wish to repeat it in Aglionby. He had meant to say no to Ronan even though he wanted so badly to be friends with him (he was Gansey’s friend, and Adam wanted to be friends with all of Gansey’s friends). But then Blue had shown up, and that was where all of his problems with being friends with Richard C. Gansey III and Ronan Lynch started. Adam didn’t want Blue to be upset but he knew it was probably hard not to be pissed off at him since he was the one who disappeared after a year of being together. And if Blue knew Adam was a dick, he sure as hell didn’t want his new friends to have the same opinion.

He picked up his scalpel again, unsure whether he should reply as a few minutes had passed and Ronan had stopped looking at him and was back to prodding his frog, but then he tapped a finger at Adam’s side of the desk to remind of the question.

“I don’t know,” he said finally, reaching for his notebook to take down notes on his frog’s organs. “I thought you said you already filled all your band positions…?” He trailed off, unsure of how to continue and annoyed with how hopeful he felt that Ronan would say no, that there would be space left enough for him to be part of their band but at the same time, he didn’t think they would want him around if they were friends with Blue.  _He_  wouldn’t want him around if he was friends with Blue.

Ronan dropped his scalpel with a clatter and stripped off his gloves, just as the bell rang. His frog was long dead. He smiled nastily at Adam. “It’s just a jam session, Parrish, not a marriage proposal.”

Adam thought that was such a weird thing to say, but this was what he wanted, what he had longed for ever since the school term started. “Okay,” he said quietly. Around them, their classmates had started to pack up, most leaving their drugged frogs still wide open and pulsing alive. Adam made quick work of his before he finished his notes. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

The thin smile on Ronan’s face widened into a diabolical grin as he stood up. “Cool. See you around, Parrish.”

Adam’s hands were shaking when he finally stripped his own gloves and washed up. He wondered whether it was a good idea to be cooped in a room with his aspirations and failures mingling in the same air.

 

 

Adam knew that Ronan had waited for him at the end of classes and that he had probably told Gansey and Noah that he was going to join them that evening, both boys had waved and smiled and fist-bumped with him when he passed them in school. Adam saw them hanging back at the school parking lot, scanning the quad, but he opted to slip out of school quietly. He did not have any work lined up that afternoon and he sorely wished he did so he could just go to work and put it out of his mind that Ronan Lynch had invited him to Monmouth to “jam”.

His hands wouldn’t stop shaking since the Biology lab class.

By the time he wheeled into Antietam Lane and got off his bike, he had mostly convinced himself that it was probably not a good idea to go anyway. He had biked home to do some homework and get a change of clothes, but he was shaking so badly he had almost fallen off his bike on the way home. He didn’t want to go to Gansey’s apartment looking like a wreck. He didn’t want to see Blue and her judgmental eyes.

His mother was hanging up his dad’s clothes on the three lines next to the doublewide when he trudged home. She didn’t look at him as he slipped into the trailer, but she spent a good amount of time walking around looking for a lighter for her cheap cigarette. Adam kept his head down as he walked into his room and started with his homework.

When he next looked up to switch on the single dry white light in his room, it was starting to get dark. He was probably an hour past the time Ronan had mentioned they would have started and he was sure they would, by now, have forgotten all about him. They had Blue after all, they had each other.

He got up to get changed, and planned on heating up water for the last cup of noodles in the kitchen pantry, when his mother walked in. She had finished hanging up the laundry, but not done smoking. She was never done smoking.

“Someone’s here to see you, kid,” she said around her cigarette. Suck. Blow. Rinse and repeat. She hunted around the living room for the remote control.

Adam fished for it from between the ratty cushions of his dad’s old recliner, and handed it to her. It was 6PM. In an hour, his dad would get home. Adam peered through the dirty curtains in the kitchen to try to catch a glimpse of whoever it was in the darkness outside. All he saw was the bright glare of headlights trained on the doublewide.

Shit.

“I’m going out, mom,” he said quietly. He didn’t wait for his mother to answer. She would say no. She would tell him his dad was coming home soon and if he didn’t want a fist rattling his teeth in the middle of the night, he probably shouldn’t leave. She would tell him it’s his fault. She always told him it was his fault, at least a little.

He ran a hand through his hair jerkily, slipping into his battered sneakers. His mother didn’t look at him. “I uh, forgot that I have a study group in school,” he lied.

If his mother had any opinions that he wasn’t carrying his book bag, she didn’t mention anything as he quietly slipped out of the house. He fumbled in the dark for a while, picking his way to the adjacent garage, occasionally hitting his face with still-damp laundry hanging on clotheslines. This was his father’s playground: a dumping ground of sorts of all of the things Robert Parrish could afford to buy instead of paying for his son’s tuition or uniform. Adam spent an inordinate amount of his free time in the garage because the truth was Robert Parrish just liked his things, he didn’t really care for any of them, including the broken down old Ford pickup rusting in the middle of the garage. Adam had spent hours on that thing from the time he was thirteen, fixing it up every time it broke down, learning his trade so he could get a job. In this playground of things his family didn’t need, it was easy to hide his own frivolous little secret. His dad would never have discovered the battered 10-year-old guitar, not just because of the ingenious hiding place Adam had discovered (clipping the guitar under the body of the pickup was stupid, sure, it would get damaged, destroyed even if anyone bothered to use the pickup, but no one had, not since it had finally sputtered its last breath on the way down to the trailer park that his dad actually had to pay Boyd to tow it home, Adam couldn’t understand why his dad didn’t just sell the old thing, he had already bought a working one since the Ford broke down, instead of having it take up space in a house where space was already at such a premium, but he supposed it was a good thing the truck was still there, otherwise, he would probably be living in a tent in the garage instead of his tiny bedroom, and it was a good enough hiding place, so.) But also because the guitar was so battered and dirty, Robert Parrish would not have imagined it as something that Adam actually paid money for. Anyone could mistake the pathetic instrument as cast off from one of their neighbors. They always had one of those types in the trailer park, the ones who spent their entire lives chasing down a Nashville career.

It was Noah’s Mustang in the gutted driveway. Adam felt his gut wrench at the thought of one of his friends actually knowing that he lived here. The fancy red car had no place in the dust and trash of Adam’s Henrietta.

Noah had his window down as he waved at Adam and then he spotted her. Shit. Blue was with him. So that was how he knew.

“Hey Adam!” he greeted brightly as if Adam hadn’t ditched them for the past 2 hours. He unlocked the doors and allowed Adam to get into the backseat. “Ronan said you were coming, and Blue and I thought you may have just forgotten since you’re probably doing homework.” The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled, his gray eyes glittered in the gloom. Adam flushed guiltily. “Good thing Blue knew where you lived, huh?” There was no judgment in his voice, for which Adam was silently both glad and apprehensive.

Blue turned back to him slowly from the passenger seat. Adam held his breath for the inevitable tirade of how he was doing it again: how he was dropping people from his life, dropping friends, when they only wanted to spend time with him. Blue would tell Noah exactly what kind of an asshole Adam was.

She smiled at him, the same guileless smile that Noah had as he reversed the car out of the driveway. “Hey Adam. Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Adam flushed even more. Even in the semi-darkness of the approaching dusk, Blue’s smile never failed to remind of things he couldn’t have. Good things. She was so pretty. Her bangs had grown out a bit and they swept in a side part on her forehead. Different colored clips pinned back the rest of her hair to her head as it was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she would occasionally tuck any stray tufts of hair behind her ears and her midi-rings would get caught in the clips on her head, or on the six hoop earrings on her left ear. Adam was still attracted to her, in spite of everything that had happened between them (or maybe because of everything that happened between them), and he had to remind himself that they were no longer together, that he had to get his shit together, so Blue would not have to lie to his friends.

“Sorry,” he said, then added lamely, “I guess I didn’t realize how late it was.”

Noah turned on the radio and he spent the rest of the drive to Monmouth chatting with Blue about her music preferences (eclectic, lots of instrumentals, bass and guitar riffs, but also wailing banshee type of violins, and soft vocals—she threw Adam a quick look at this—and heavy, fast-paced drum work). Adam spent the drive in guilty silence, clutching his battered, dirty guitar, careful not to set it on the pristine leather upholstery of Noah’s car, and wondering, not for the first time, why he kept digging his grave deeper.

* * *

 

Ronan was already on his third beer when the door to Monmouth Manufacturing finally creaked open to admit Noah and Blue, with a guilty looking Adam Parrish in tow. Gansey greeted the three of them, eagerly lapping up Adam’s lame excuse of doing homework and forgetting the time, Gansey even asking about a particularly difficult problem in their Trigonometry homework which Adam agreed very quickly to help him early the next day if Gansey wanted. It pissed Ronan off immensely.

He chucked the empty can to the trashcan near Gansey’s bed, missed, and ignored it completely when it rolled under the bed, beyond his reach. Let that be someone else’s problem. He didn’t care. “So are we all done with the niceties and homework now? Can we get the fuck to playing music or are we just going to talk fuckall about math now?” He didn’t bother to look at Adam, and pointedly picked up his guitar, left in the middle of the floor.

Gansey shot Ronan a warning look, which he ignored, just as Noah turned to Adam sympathetically, patting his hand, and whispered, “He’s got his panties in a bunch when you didn’t show up at 5 sharp, but neither did Gansey or Blue, so ignore him.”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Can we start? Parrish, fuck, you can’t use that piece of shit to play here.” He chucked his guitar just then and grabbed Adam’s dirty acoustic guitar and strummed a few chords. “This shit isn’t even tuned, man, what the fuck? I asked you here to sing, nobody needs your stupid guitar.”

Adam flushed again, suddenly aware that everyone was watching him even as they all tried to pretend to be busy with their instruments. Ronan only regarded him darkly.

“Just pick a fucking song, man. We’ll play whatever.” He didn’t miss the anxious stare Adam threw in Blue’s direction. Blue just shrugged and went to adjust the strap of her bass. Ronan’s mood darkened even further if that were possible. He picked up his guitar again and tapped his foot impatiently.

Running an awkward and through his hair, Adam finally took to the mic stand. “Uh, you guys know any song by Muse?”

Blue’s answering grin defused the tense air as she drifted towards Gansey to point out the tune as if they had talked about this before. Ronan’s brow knitted but he obligingly played the opening bars of Undisclosed Desires, and was quickly followed into the music by Blue, Noah and Gansey. When Adam opened his mouth to sing, Ronan was already wrapped up in the magic.

 _I know you’ve suffered_  
 _But I don’t want you to hide_  
 _It’s cold and loveless_  
 _I won’t let you be denied_  


_Soothing_   
_I’ll make you feel pure_   
_Trust me_   
_You can be sure_

_I want to reconcile the violence in your heart_   
_I want to recognize your beauty’s not just a mask_   
_I want to exorcise the demons from your past_   
_I want to satisfy the undisclosed desires in your heart_

Adam Parrish’s voice felt like the kindling to that magic.

They played a few more songs, some of which Adam did not sing and he had handed the mic over to Blue, and picked up his guitar and played melody to Ronan’s lead. By the third song, Ronan no longer cared that Adam and Blue sang answering duets of Love the Way You Lie, although he did not miss the way that Adam’s fingers twitched when handing off the mic to Blue for her to handle the rap. The curious gender bend of their voices entranced him so much that the ache he felt in his own fingers when they looked at each other almost didn’t hurt.

This was his dream and he had never felt so alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying to post all of the chapters I've already written before I vomit out more words. So far, I'm currently writing CH13, so there's tons more words to get through, but this'll probably get updated daily until I catch up with the chapter I'm writing.
> 
> In other news, I love Undisclosed Desires.
> 
> Also, I don't know why but I keep assuming people can play shit together without practice. Whatevs. My friends in bands back in high school did that (they were pretty crappy), but it worked, and I guess and that's just how all my band assumptions go.


	5. New Romantics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Ronan drops anvil sized hints and Adam has a crisis.

Six weeks passed in a whirlwind of school, work and band practice twice weekly at Monmouth Manufacturing. Adam could scarcely believe that this was his life. He was friends with the kings of Aglionby, had made a quiet, unspoken peace with his ex-girlfriend (they weren’t even awkward during practice sessions, imagine that!), and was now in a high school band with said friends and ex-girlfriend. He even got a third job somewhere in between, a morning four-hour part-time shift restocking shelves at a convenience store near St. Agnes church.

At band practice, the five of them talked excitedly about their band’s name. Blue had also heard, through the Nino’s grapevine, of an upcoming music event called Band Night, meant to attract local up-and-coming music talent, sponsored by the local music store in the nearby strip mall. She came into practice one evening waving a flyer stolen from Nino’s announcement boards and declared that the band needed to practice much more to be able to join. The Band Night was in three months, just after the New Year. Noah and Ronan were particularly stoked. This was their dream. Their practices became longer and more grueling, after one night during which Ronan brought up the idea of making their own music, and producing the score of his first song. Gansey had never been more proud, and that night, Adam listened as they first learned to play the instrumentals of Ronan’s music, Adam began to hope.

Ronan’s song had no lyrics yet, but the sweet melancholy of the piano instrumentals spoke to Adam on a level he had never thought music would ever touch him. He had only learned to play his guitar because of an afternoon with a Nashville aspirant neighbor who had nothing better to do than teach a twelve-year-old loitering in his yard, and he only ever sang because it relieved the ache of loneliness that occasionally threatened to overwhelm him on the nights he spent alone in his room, or worse, on the days when his father decided to teach him the value of making himself useful with his fists. But those days were few and far between in the weeks between that first practice session and the present that Adam was almost happy not to have to constantly wear the heavy sweaters he had taken to in order to hide the numerous bruises he normally sustained on even his father’s good nights.

He didn’t know how he had let himself believe that such a lull would last.

It was the week of Thanksgiving. They had practice only on Tuesday that week, because Noah and Gansey were going to go home to their families in New York and DC respectively. Noah had suggested that they nix the Monmouth practice session and go to an open mic at a local café. There would be no alcohol, everyone except Noah were minors, but it had sounded like a good idea, and Gansey had asserted that it would be good practice for Adam and Blue, who may have stage fright singing in front of a crowd come Band Night. Adam would have pointed out that Blue would never have stage fright – she busked occasionally with her cousin, Orla, who played the piano/keyboards, on weekend markets when they were thirteen, but he wisely kept his mouth shut because Ronan had been so enthusiastic about the idea, even with the lack of alcohol at the event, that there was no brooking dissent. Adam could not find it in himself to burst Ronan’s bubble, especially when he looked almost adorable with his child-like excitement. And besides, he probably needed the practice. Gansey had told him that he was fronting the band as the lead vocalist (by now, it was in agreement that Blue would primarily play bass, and provide backup vocals with Ronan, and a female duet voice when the song called for it, though Ronan’s musical arrangements of their covers rarely called for female vocals), and Adam was mortally afraid that he would stutter or say something stupid when he wasn’t singing. An open mic would let him have the feel of singing in front of a crowd without the judgment of an actual audience, or even his bandmates.

Nevertheless, on open mic night, Ronan brought his newest electric guitar and a small amp that he assured the band was allowed (he did ask the café and they said there was no problem in bringing small instruments that could fit the tiny stage, and the black amp was small and unobtrusive). They had a different arrangement that night, because Adam had to work in the afternoon at the garage, as opposed to their regular Wednesday sessions when he had no work at all. Ronan offered to pick him up after his shift, and Gansey had agreed to pick up Blue from Nino’s where she had managed to swap the low-peak shift from Cialina. Noah decided to ride with Gansey, smiling amiably at Adam when he told him that he liked a shorter route to town that didn’t have to go out to the town limits. Adam wondered himself why Ronan didn’t just go with the rest of them: he could bike to the café with no problem, or catch a bus if he didn’t want to sweat it so much, but Ronan had told him he had nothing better to do anyway, and there was no arguing with Ronan Lynch when he decided he was going to do something, so Adam had shrugged it off and agreed to the free ride. At least he wasn’t arriving to the café drenched in sweat from cycling out.

And it was a good thing Ronan had decided to pick him up. Halfway to town, the heavens decided to heave up and poured a hail storm on Ronan’s BMW. Adam was sure if he had cycled to the café, he would be unconscious on the roadside two minutes into the storm. The hail stones that besieged the BMW was larger than marbles, and Adam guessed that if those things hit him hard enough, he would keel over and die. It was a wonder that the BMW wasn’t dented and the windshield cracked by the time they reached their destination.

By then, the hail had turned into a heavy downpour. He and Ronan quickly retrieved Ronan’s guitar and amp, Ronan shielding the guitar from the rain with his leather jacket, and Adam trying unsuccessfully to stuff the amp under his long-sleeved sweatshirt. They laughed good-naturedly at how the other boy looked like a drowned cat drenched in the rain. Adam procured a stained handkerchief from one of the pockets of his faded cargo pants and handed it over to Ronan, even as he wiped the rain from his brow with the back of his hand. Ronan proceeded to use the handkerchief to dry his guitar and amp, completely ignoring his face, and grinning when Adam stared at him quizzically, before shrugging out of his jacket and shaking the water out of the leather at Adam’s face.

They arrived earlier than their friends—Blue apparently had a hard time wiggling out of the shift, which she only wanted to finish halfway because Noah was whining that he was bored and Gansey could no longer handle him and had to beg Blue to beg out of her shift, but it was next to impossible as 5pm rolled around and the crowd was just starting to pick up, how could Blue abandon Cialina like that, and so on.

Adam and Ronan made their way into the café. They were the only patrons at the hour. The staff were still getting their equipment and stage ready for open mic night, and muttered among themselves at the sight of Adam’s threadbare, damp sweatshirt and Ronan’s sharp, patented bad boy looks, with his leather jacket slung over his shoulder, guitar in tow, gigantic black tattoo snaking hooks and beaks and feathers up the back of his neck and shoulder blades, visible from the damp black muscle t-shirt he wore under the jacket. It didn’t look like they were going to get a good crowd that evening.

Ronan busied himself with making sure that his amp and guitar were still alive, and only quirked a curious brow at Adam when he pulled a crumpled piece of tissue from another cargo pant pocket. It contained the lyrics of the song he planned to sing.

“What’s that?”

Adam’s brow furrowed as his fingers twitched as if making a chord on an air guitar. “I’m thinking of playing an accompaniment. Do you think I could borrow your guitar?” He couldn’t hide the flush that sprang to his cheeks even with his tan. He didn’t like borrowing or asking for things from his friends. That just wasn’t how Adam Parrish operated in his life.

Ronan shrugged, turning away from the amp, which he set at the foot of their table as he grabbed a menu off another table, biting his lower lip in consideration at the drinks available. “Shit, they don’t have beer.” He looked back up at Adam. “If you want to, but I think I could probably play whatever you have, if you want.”

“Uh,” Adam said. He didn’t think Ronan was alive yet when his song choice was made, but Ronan made surprising song choices himself and knew a lot of good rock music from the eighties and nineties. So it wasn’t like Adam was probably born before his song choice either, but he liked the nineties era for a lot of different reasons. “Do you know this?” He passed the tissue to Ronan. It was soggy from his pants getting wet when they ran in the rain, and the ink had mostly run, but his handwritten chords and lyrics were still somewhat readable.

Ronan snorted. “Garbage? Of course, I know it. My dad was big on Irish and Scottish rock bands when he was alive.”

“Oh,” Adam said. He hadn’t known that Ronan’s father had died, but now that Ronan had mentioned it, he did recall that that had caused a huge ripple in Henrietta. Singer’s Falls, where Ronan had lived before, wasn’t that far off, and Niall Lynch had been brutally murdered if Adam’s memory served him. In fact, he recalled one of his sons had discovered his body… “Oh,” he said again, suddenly understanding. “Sorry…”

Ronan shook his head. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.” He sniffed and read the chords and lyrics over again, looking Adam over. “You sure you’re singing this? I think it’s going to sound a little different without drums.”

Adam’s smile was a painful, sad affair. “Yes. I’m going to sing that.”

Blue, Gansey and Noah chose to arrive at that moment. All three were also drenched, just as the two of them had been, and were laughing over a private joke shared between them before they had arrived. The three of them smiled and waved their greeting before Blue and Noah drifted to join them at their table, while Gansey went to the counter to order drinks and food.

Ronan turned back to Adam again. “Coffee, Parrish? Anything to eat?”

Adam looked up from his lyrics tissue, which Ronan had left on the table. “Uh, whatever you’re having.” He didn’t want to say nothing, even though his stomach growled in anticipation of food. He didn’t really have enough money to afford anything on the menu. “I’ll pay you later.”

Ronan just rolled his eyes and sauntered up to the counter to join Gansey in ordering their food. Adam ran a shaky hand through his damp hair, trying to will it to flatten on his head and not stick out every which way. He was perfectly aware that his hair looked like a rat’s nest after getting rained on and then shaking all the water out before they stepped into the café. Blue was smiling at him as she sat across the table from him and reach over to pull damp blond, stringy hair from his forehead.

“You look like a lost puppy, Adam!” Blue exclaimed as she flicked her own wilted hair away from her face. Noah nodded his enthusiastic agreement. His own curly blond hair had flattened almost straight on his head.

Adam huffed and pouted. “Ronan shook out his jacket in my face.”

“I did no such thing,” Ronan replied with a snort as he and Gansey emerged back with trays of sugary sweet coffee concoctions and buttery pastries that had no nutritional value. “This one’s for you, Parrish.”

Adam considered the monstrously large order of cappuccino Ronan pressed into his hand. There was a smiley face latte art with tiny little chocolate syrup hearts at the edge of the cup. Noah grinned at the coffee.

“I think he’s happy to see you, Adam!” he chirped, poking the smiley face in Adam’s drink with the wrong end of a teaspoon.

Ronan scowled at him. “Ruin your own latte art drink, Czerny.” And Noah pouted and complained that frappuccinos couldn’t be expected to have latte art.

“I don’t think this looks like anything you drink, Lynch.” He compared the size of his cup with Ronan’s. Ronan’s drink was considerably smaller, had no latte art. Two plates of expensive looking croissants clattered between him and Ronan and Noah. Adam scowled at this. “This is too much. How would we finish this?” The underlying question was how would he afford to pay Ronan back for this? It was too frivolous.

“You’re not eating all of it, dumbass. It’s for everyone.”

Somehow, Adam doubted that, because when Gansey set his tray down, there was even more over-priced buttery pastry to pass around to Blue and Noah. Adam eyed one of the pastries suspiciously before gingerly picking one, and taking it apart on a clean tissue, and stuffing a large piece into his mouth. If he didn’t almost choke himself with his food and his eyes started to water, he would have seen the suspiciously pleased look in Ronan’s face, before it was hidden by the other boy’s coffee mug.

Blue passed him a paper cup of water, which he drank from gratefully to ease the food going down his dry throat. “Ugh, I don’t know how to eat these things, I guess.” His hands shook when he realized his accent had slipped and he was sure he sounded like a complete bumpkin, but no one, except Ronan, had looked at him. They were all busy discussing their song choices.

Gansey and Noah both worried that they would sound funny. Neither boy had any vocal talent, and Blue had bluntly told Gansey that he was utterly tone deaf when singing. Gansey decided that he would play Blue’s music for her song choice, a meme song from the Saturday Night Live called Boombox. Noah matched her song choice with another meme song from The Lonely Island, aptly called I Run NY, and Adam had to concede that while Noah had no real vocal talent or a good range, he did rap pretty well. Adam agreed to sing Billie Joe Armstrong’s parts for Noah.

The café was finally starting to fill up, and a few minutes later, the manager announced that the stage was open for open mic. He announced a few ground rules on the open mic, before having one of the café employees go around the table to take in the names of the people joining in. Gansey, now the unofficial leader of the group, put in their names into three groups, first with Blue, then Noah, then Adam.

Adam wondered briefly why Ronan wasn’t singing—he’d heard Ronan sing on one of their sessions before, and he had a nice voice, nicer, Adam thought, than his own especially when his accent seeped in, but Ronan offered no explanation, and Adam decided to concentrate on listening to the other patrons who were starting up. He had never been to an open mic before, let alone one hosted in a café. Café and Adam Parrish did not exist together in principle, but here he was, sipping overpriced, milk-drowned coffee, eating fancy baked pastries, and enjoying the evening with his friends. He could almost forget what he was on nights like this, when his life was intertwined so intricately with his friends’ that they weren’t any different from him. He was not Adam Parrish, trailer trash, on nights like this. He was just Adam Parrish, teenage boy with a somewhat nice voice in a high school band.

Before long, Blue was called to the stage, and she sauntered up, Gansey in tow. Adam watched her with wistful longing. They had had no closure, Blue and he, and he couldn’t bring himself to look at her without feeling a pang of desire for what he had lost, what he wished he still had. Blue was a fierce bundle of energy, all tan skin, shapely, slim legs and a Coke bottle figure Adam wouldn’t be able to forget easily. Once upon a time, they had walked around Henrietta with his arm slung over her shoulder, or her hand in his.

“Hi everyone,” she greeted the café patrons with the same spunky exuberance he remembered when they’d first met and introduced herself to him, walking up to his desk at the very back of the classroom in middle school. Adam thought she looked strangely ethereal in the bright stage light, and he wondered what was different before he realized that she was wearing burgundy lipstick. It framed her lips perfectly, gave an almost impish mischief to the twinkle in her brown eyes. “We’re actually a band, but since we couldn’t all bring our instruments, my bandmates—“ She gestured towards their table, and Noah and Adam waved at the rest of the café patrons. Ronan only glared silently. “—and I decided to sing three sets for y’all instead.” Adam found the Henrietta accent adorable on Blue. Why did he find it so repulsive in his own voice?

Blue and Noah each sang their sets to the quiet tittering of the crowd, especially at Noah’s profanity-laced meme. Even Adam had a hard time containing his laughter while singing backup, because Noah tried his very best to look badass for his set, but with his flattened blond curls, wide gray eyes, dimpled disarming smile, and damp gray Aglionby sweater, he looked about as threatening as a stuff toy. A very dirty, drenched in gutter water, stuff toy.

And then it was Adam’s turn. He walked up to the stage, Ronan trailing behind him, carrying the guitar and the amp. Ronan made short work of setting up his amp and guitar and nodded to Adam when he was ready.

Adam knew his hands were shaking again. He ran one trembling hand through his hair, now dried and sticking out awkwardly in all directions, before smiling a bit crookedly at the crowd, and then promptly forgot to introduce himself or Ronan. “This is our song tonight, Fix Me Now, by Garbage.”

Even without drums and bass to complete the music, Ronan’s guitar was savage. Adam began to sing.

_Things don’t have to be this way  
Catch me on a better day_

_Bury me above the clouds_  
_All the way from here_  
_Take away the things I need  
_ _Take away my fear_

_Hide me in a hollow sound_  
_Happy evermore_  
_Everything I had to give  
_ _Gave out long before_

_Fix me now I wish you would_  
_Bring me back to life_  
_Kiss me blind somebody should  
_ _From hollow into light_

He didn’t have to glance back at Ronan to tell him that he wouldn’t finish the song. Ronan understood the keen of Adam’s voice, the trail of Henrietta into the refrain, and took over with a loud riff and wail of his guitar before ending the song. Adam blinked at the microphone in his hand. He hadn’t realized he was about to cry until he felt the sting of tears at the corner of his eyes. He tipped his head in a bow to avoid having to look at the crowd, and then busied himself trying to help Ronan with the amp. Ronan waved him away.

He blinked rapidly before he straightened, and faced his friends only when the shine in his eyes no longer threatened to spill out onto his cheeks. He couldn’t understand what had spurred on the waterworks, and just then, he had no time to contemplate this as Noah, Gansey and Blue had gotten up from their table and crowded around him and Ronan hugging them both and laughing and exulting.

Adam’s haunting voice had brought down the house and he couldn’t stop smiling at the triumphant crows of delight from his friends, until the stage manager finally shooed them off the vicinity of the stage and back to their table. Adam couldn’t have imagined how unbelievable singing on stage made him feel, and he drew a shuddering breath, daring to look at Ronan to see if his friend understood and shared in the exhilaration.

Ronan’s eyes were shining too. Triumphant. “Fuck this joint, man, we need to drink and celebrate!” And it was a pronouncement Adam could not argue with. They were kings together. Kings for the night.

* * *

 

Adam tried his best to wriggle out of drinking that night, but everyone was in agreement that they all needed to celebrate: their group had received a great response even if the café crowd was small and Gansey had astutely pointed out that this was the beginning of a promising indie career for their band. They would spend the rest of the night mapping out more songs to play, working on arrangements, maybe even brainstorming lyrics for Ronan’s song.

But the excitement that buzzed in their veins at the end of open mic night proved to be too much for organized thought, and once Ronan cracked out the beer and Noah lit up his joint, everyone just fell into continuing the vein of open mic, and took their turns belting out their favorite songs and jamming tunes on Ronan’s guitar. It was here that Adam learned that Blue not only sang, rapped and played the bass, but she could also give Noah a run for his money on the drums, accompanied by the wilted whine of melancholy guitars as played by Gansey, and Adam had to laugh when Ronan drunkenly belted out a gender bent Bleeding Love, with Noah crooning backup vocals as he passed around his joint. Adam passed on the weed but did not argue when Blue handed him a beer and clinked their bottles to triumphant cheers.

They played and sang well into the night, and as the empty bottles piled and new joints were lit, Adam eventually forgot about his curfew, forgot his unease, forgot that there would be school tomorrow, and hell to pay if he did not show up at home. By the time the last person, Noah, had finished his awkward song and dance rendition of Dangerous (complete with the crotch-grabbing and funky hat routine, from where he found that ridiculous hat, Adam would probably never be sure as he had never seen one sold in any of the local stores, but maybe Noah had bought it whenever he went home to New York), Adam was truly too happy and too tired to face the next day. He promptly fell asleep in Gansey’s couch, and dreamt of guitar riffs, and melancholy piano tunes, of fast-paced drumbeats and loud crashes of cymbals. He dreamt of Blue and the way she would shut her eyes, gripping the mic, and growl when she rapped, of Noah, a beast on drums even when high or maybe especially when high, of a handsome, ruffled Gansey, top two buttons of his Italian tailored dress shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up as he bobbed his head to the electronic tunes from his keyboards, and of Ronan’s savage, fiery glare when Adam had challenged him to a guitar duel, how the aggressive riff of the electric guitar swallowed the dulcet strums of his acoustic guitar, as they sang together the chorus of Sweet Dreams, Ronan’s voice deep and melodic, Adam’s husky and soft and ragged at the edges as he screamed into his mic, sounding entirely like a trippy mix of Annie Lennox and Marilyn Manson. He dreamt of the soft, lullabye tune of Ronan’s composition, words licking the edges of his unconscious mind, whispering a different tune he would not quite understand.

By the time he awoke, there were no more dreams to be had, but the smile on his lips was hopeful, quite like the tiny flutter he felt in his chest. He allowed himself a few moments of silent grasping at the retreating dreams, before his eyelids fluttered open and reality set in.

It was early Wednesday morning, and Adam had just missed the start of his shift at the convenience store. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and his back was sore from half-sitting, half lying in a fetal position all night in Gansey’s couch, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Someone, he didn’t know who, probably Noah or Gansey, had thrown a soft down blanket over him when he fell asleep, and he instinctively gathered the soft folds of the fabric to his face, as if to wipe the last vestiges of sleep, but also to try to cling some more to his dreams, unwilling to face the rest of the world outside Monmouth Manufacturing. His world. Adam’s Henrietta was out there, and he had not gone home the previous night. His bones ached in anticipation of his father’s fists beating discipline out of his sorry hide.

He cast around silently to see if anyone else was up. Noah was asleep at the other end of the couch. He had changed into cartoon unicorn-printed pajama pants, and tugged the other end of Adam’s blanket to his chin. A pale, bony shoulder peeked out of the edge of the fabric, which only covered his bare torso and arms, and his toes wiggled ever so slightly at the hem of the pajama pants. Adam thought at first he was waking, but the slight snore that he let out told him the other boy was probably just dreaming. Noah drooled on the blanket. It was weirdly endearing. A few feet away, Gansey was sprawled in the middle of his giant king-sized bed, fully-dressed, handsome face smothered into a giant pillow. Blue and Ronan were nowhere in sight, and Adam thought that maybe someone had driven Blue home the previous night, though he doubted anyone would have had the presence of mind – they were all drunk and high by the time he had fallen asleep.

As if to punctuate that thought, two doors at the end of the hall opened at the same time, and out of each door walked a fantasy and a god.

Adam shrank back into the couch, pretending to be asleep even as his heartbeat quickened at the sight of Ronan walking out of his room in nothing but expensive black boxers, and Blue cast about quietly, clips removed from her disheveled hair, shoulders bare, body covered only in a towel wrapped under her armpits. The shredded denim shorts trimmed with cotton lace and black tulle that she had worn the previous night peeked out from the edge of the towel. Her eyes widened at the sight of Ronan, walking out of his room, rubbing his eyes and making straight for the coffee machine in the kitchen-bathroom-laundry room. She hugged her arms and tugged the towel tighter around her chest.

“Um.” Her voice was soft and she looked a little bedraggled as she followed Ronan to the kitchen. Adam felt his stomach drop. “I need to shower before going home. I may have puked a little on Noah’s bed.” She sounded sheepish as she scratched the back of her ear where she had her six hoop earrings tangled in a tuft of hair.

Ronan cast her a bored, disinterested stare. His sharp blue eyes were still clouded with sleep. Adam felt the rise of an uncomfortable lump in his throat as he watched the slow ripple of muscle in Ronan’s back as he poured his coffee. “Yeah, you can use whatever in here to wash up. Just take any of Noah’s clothes. They’re probably the only shit that’ll fit you here.”

Blue’s answering stare was suspicious but she didn’t say anything, just nodded her head, and closed the door when Ronan finally walked out of the bathroom, fingers curled around his steaming mug. Adam had forgotten that he was pretending to be asleep and was looking quite openly. Ronan was headed his way and for whatever reason, Adam’s ears felt immensely hot as he stared and stared. Blue was the prettiest thing Adam had ever seen, especially looking rumpled and in nothing but that towel wrapped around her body, but Ronan Lynch, in his black boxers, coffee in hand, was a god.

“Hey Parrish,” Ronan greeted, all casual. He wasn’t hungover at all, even though it was entirely likely that Ronan had drunk all of them under the table the previous night. Completely unlike Adam who felt like his world was tipping over ever so slightly on its axis.

“Good mornin’,” he croaked. His throat felt like someone had stuffed a huge wad of cotton down his esophagus and he tried and failed to clip his accent, as he flung off the blanket and stood abruptly. His hands were shaking again, and he cast about helplessly to check the time. His watch had stopped, but the digital alarm clock at the foot of Gansey’s bed told him it was 6:35. The dawn was still gray and he had no idea how he could see Ronan so clearly in the gloom. None of the lights were on. It was like the other boy was in suddenly ultra high definition, and everything else was a watery gray blur.

“I—I have to go home!” he stammered at Ronan’s quizzical look. Adam didn’t know if he could adequately explain the beginnings of the panic attack licking at the edges of his vision to someone like Ronan, who stood in the middle of the apartment looking like Adonis. “My dad…”

He didn’t finish his thought as he hurriedly slipped on his sneakers, and hurtled out of the apartment and into the waking street. The cold morning air bit into his lungs and he had to stop, and slow down his pace to catch his breath. The 75 cents he paid for the bus that took him back to Antietam Lane was the last bit of money he had in his wallet, and it was only when he was walking up to the doublewide that he remembered that he had left his bike in the backseat of Ronan Lynch’s car. He would have to come back for that after the holiday. He had no idea what his friends had planned for Thanksgiving, but he was sure it was nothing like the cold, unhappy fall day that Adam was walking into.

By the time he reached home, his mother was having coffee, and his father was just rousing, and his body was finally cooperating, his hands weren’t shaking and his ears felt normal. Adam resigned himself to the bruises he would get and to missing the last day of school before the holiday started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fix Me Now by Garbage is from 1995, at least 5 years before Ronan was born, according to my fanfic xD
> 
> Nineties music is my jam.


	6. All Too Well

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Ronan and Blue get a Happy Meal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a major trigger warning for abuse (it is referenced, not actually shown, but it's bad and really messed up)

Adam did not show up to first period that morning. It was the first class that the three boys shared and from Gansey’s curious gaze at the empty seat that Adam normally occupied, Ronan surmised that this was the first time since school started that Adam was ever absent for class. It was not a big deal—the five of them had been mostly drunk and high the previous night, and Ronan could understand that not everyone could handle as much alcohol as he could and still function like a normal human being, but Adam had seemed perfectly fine when he left Monmouth that morning. He maybe had been a little flustered, but Ronan could easily attribute that to Blue’s presence: Adam was always a little off-kilter whenever Blue was around, and although he had appeared mostly asleep when Blue had drifted out of Noah’s room smelling like stale beer, weed and puke, Ronan could tell Adam had seen her walking about Monmouth with just a towel to hide her girly bits. When he had stepped out of his room to make coffee, he had glimpsed the tense curve of muscle on Adam’s freckled neck and had easily guessed that he had pretended to be asleep to hide the massive boner he nursed at the sight of Blue. Judging from the jerky, awkward movements the other boy had made before he rushed out to go home, Ronan’s guess was probably not too far from the truth.

He sneered inwardly, annoyed with himself that he even cared. That Blue and Adam had been a couple was already old news by now. Ronan had been mostly able to shoot down whatever curl of—was that disappointment? Frustration?—at the sight of them together at practices. They shared a closeness that was easily apparent when they played music together: each understanding the other’s move before one made it. It was one of the reasons why their practice sessions had been so easy and fluid. Ronan, Gansey and Noah performed as a unit, Blue and Adam as another entity, and the only work to be done was really to mesh the two worlds together, and Ronan thought the five of them worked that magic beautifully. Except where they didn’t, and that was on Ronan’s ego but he wasn’t about to admit that to anyone just yet, even though Noah’s curious glances had been getting steadily more pointed, but that didn’t matter in the grand picture of forming and keeping their band together. Adam Parrish was a pretty face with a pretty voice, and Ronan Lynch was perfectly capable of keeping his hands to himself, like a normal human being. Adam didn’t swing that way anyway, obviously, so Ronan was quite content to admire him in silence, and tamp down his misery every time Adam and Blue shared a moment together wherever he could see it. Besides, they weren’t together anymore so what was the problem?

Absolutely nothing, if anyone were to ask him.

(No one did, but Noah’s smile that morning when he saw Adam leave was a work of art, and if it weren’t for Blue walking out the bathroom at just that moment, and Gansey waking and going from sleepy to scandalized at the sight of his roommates walking around the apartment nonchalantly undressed in front of a girl as if they did that everyday, Ronan had half a mind to knock a few teeth loose from the smug look that Noah had shot him. Of course, the walking around the apartment part wasn’t really a problem for Ronan. Blue should be thankful he bothered to wear boxers at all, that early in the morning.)

By the end of third period and still no sight of Adam, Gansey was already antsy with the knowledge that their friend had left their apartment perfectly fine, but was now either too sick or tired to show up to school. Straight A Parrish just wasn’t the type, and Gansey reminded Ronan that in the weeks he hadn’t shown up to school, Adam had sat through all of his classes, even when he had been obviously tired (he always looked tired, but Adam had a special degree of deadness reserved for mornings when he had early morning shifts to work), and even on those three days immediately after prelims when he had had stomach flu from consuming massive amounts of caffeine and no solid food.

Ronan didn’t quite get why Gansey was worried, but he supposed if Adam operated normally on the border of exhaustion and martyrdom, the absence would be a bit… weird. He shrugged it off, not because he wasn’t concerned. Quite the contrary, he was a little pissed that Adam didn’t show because now, Ronan had wasted his whole morning staying in school. But Adam Parrish was a big boy, and Ronan didn’t need to be looking after any of his friends like that. That was what Gansey was for.

They met up with Noah at the quad benches for lunch break. Noah’s teachers had already suspended their afternoon classes in anticipation of the Thanksgiving holiday, but Gansey, Ronan and Adam still had Latin, after lunch, before their week at school ended. Gansey was driving off to DC that afternoon, and Noah was hitching to get to the airport. He was flying back to New York for the holiday. Ronan would be alone at Monmouth the entire long weekend.

Fist bumps were exchanged as Noah handed the other two boys lunch purchased from the gourmet deli. Ronan couldn’t enjoy his BLT with Gansey puttering about Adam all morning.

“Dude, would you give it a break?” he whined finally, bits of lettuce threatened to spray out of mouth, and Ronan caught it back in with practiced ease. “He was  _fine_  when he left. Didn’t look hung over at all.”

Noah grinned knowingly at him. His teeth were stained with marinara sauce and it was a little sickening to look at. “Damn straight, he’s fine.”

“Fuck you, man, that’s my line.” Ronan shot him back a dirty look and kicked his shin. Noah easily evaded his steel-toed boot. Gansey held his hand up for a little order.

“All I’m saying,” Gansey began, wiping the corners of his mouth neatly with a napkin and folding the remains of his demolished sub, “is that Adam’s never missed a class, even when he’s sick.” He turned to Noah. “You remember him on prelims, right? I thought he was going to have a seizure with how much he was shaking, and it turned out to be stomach flu.”

“Pretty sure Parrish is made of sterner stuff than Hoegaarden and second-hand weed smoke,” Noah said, waving a thin pale hand dismissively. He balled his sandwich wrapper and tossed it at Ronan. It hit his chest and bounced harmlessly to his feet before he kicked it in the direction of the trashcan.

Gansey glared at them sternly before picking up all their trash, and Ronan’s discarded pieces of tomatoes, and setting it to the proper trash cans. “I really don’t think so.” He sighed as he reached for one of the cold-pressed fancy bottled juices that Noah had also passed around, and turned to Ronan. “Would you check on him after class? I’m a little worried but I can’t afford to leave any later than two o’clock.” He nodded to Noah, who nodded back. Noah’s flight was at 8 PM. If they left later than 2, he could miss his flight and he would have to wait until the next day to get rebooked. “If he smelled anything like the two of you when I woke up, we could really get him into trouble.”

Ronan snorted, but didn’t comment. He had no idea where Adam Parrish lived, and he was sure that Adam did not work on Wednesdays so there was no point looking for Adam anywhere that Ronan knew.

“You could take Blue with you.” The shit-eating grin on Noah’s face was truly a work of art.

 

 

Despite his protestations, assertions of Adam being perfectly okay, or any internal feelings of betrayal to his best intentions, Ronan found himself sitting in his car, parked illegally outside Mountain View High School at 4 o’clock, waiting for Blue. He picked at the scabs on his wrists idly, as he scanned the stream of public school kids streaming out of campus like rioters let loose in Congress. Unlike Aglionby, which recognized that majority of its student population belonged to families from far off cities and states, and required ample time to travel and therefore extended the courtesy of ending classes early the day before Thanksgiving, all the kids on Mountain View were local so there was no such courtesy and the public school kids had to suffer the full eight hours of boring school day.

Blue was easy to spot in the sea of grubby local teens: she dressed like a hobo from a psychedelic Mary Poppins musical. Her neon green knitted top appeared to be thrifted from a gremlin baby store. It was two sizes too small, was ripped at the shoulders to allow for movement, and the rest of her torso was covered in eye-hurting layered purple tulle. Her dark purple skirt was similarly shredded and threaded through with black lace, though he supposed the neon green combat boots she used to finish her outfit could possibly grow on him. Ronan suspected he could get a trippy high if he looked at her long enough.

She knocked quietly on the window of his passenger seat, brow cocked expectantly. “Am I gonna get a free ride home?”

Ronan grudgingly unlocked the door to let her in and high-tailed it out of Main Street to avoid the parking officer walking his way, electronic ticket meter in hand. “Not afraid to get kidnapped and fed to mountain lions for the sport of it?” He smiled at Blue nastily, not missing the way her classmates had stared after her when she let herself into a car so obviously owned by an Aglionby boy.

Blue snorted. “The only feeding that’s going to happen here is you buying me a Happy Meal.” She rolled her eyes at the weird stares outside, apparently not missing the look Ronan had given them either. “Where’re we going?”

Ronan didn’t answer, didn’t look at her, and pointedly kept driving.

“I assume we’re supposed to be going somewhere if you just picked me up from school,” Blue said, turning to face him. Ronan gave her a sidelong glance. She had a curious glint in her eyes, a look of quiet wonder that he wasn’t too comfortable with. “I didn’t peg you as someone who would randomly pick up girls to give rides to.”

Ronan’s lip curled. So Blue had noticed. “No, you’re right. I prefer ‘em tall enough to reach my face. You look like the best thing you can reach is my armpits.”

Blue grinned at him, her eyes wicked. “Well, fuck me. We’re really having this conversation now, aren’t we?”

Ronan held a fist to her, which she knocked wondrously with her tiny knuckles. “Gansey put me on Parrish Patrol,” he said after they had been driving aimlessly around town for some time. He wanted to pick at his scabs again, but he needed at least one hand on the wheel, so he settled for gnawing at the leather bracelets on his right wrist. “He didn’t show up to school today.”

“Oh,” Blue said. There was no surprise in the tone of her voice. She sounded a little flat, like this was not news at all. “Okay.”

Ronan regarded her curiously. “Okay let’s go find out what happened to him or okay, he’s probably being a lazy shit and I shouldn’t bother?”

She shook her head, staring at the road ahead. “No, I mean okay, let’s go look for him. Do you know if he’s working today?”

“Parrish doesn’t work Wednesdays.”

Blue shot him a now-how-did-you-know-that look, and bit her lip thoughtfully. “We could ask his mom?” She sounded hesitant, like she didn’t really know if this was a good idea. It probably wasn’t. Ronan didn’t work very well asking anyone’s moms if their cute private school boy kids were okay. He’d never tried doing that before anyway. Maybe Blue could handle that.

“Okay. You know where he lives?”

She sighed tiredly. Now she looked like she didn’t really want to be doing this at all. Not with him, not with anyone. “Yeah, pull out to the highway over here. They’re on the exit after this one.”

They didn’t talk anymore after that, except for Blue to indicate directions to a wooded side of the road that looked like the scene in a slasher film. The shadows were growing longer as sunset neared. Ronan half expected to see the specter of Jason Voorhees emerging from the dusty trees of the gutted driveway that Blue pointed to. Ronan wondered how Adam managed to get home this morning. The last bus stop was at least half a mile away, and Adam’s bike was still sitting in the backseat of his car. This place didn’t look like anyone but coyotes could live here, but as they reached the edge of the dusty wood, the driveway widened into the trailer park. Blue pointed at the faded teal painted doublewide at the edge of the driveway. So this was where Adam Parrish lived.

No wonder he hadn’t wanted Ronan to give him a ride all those weeks ago, when he had hotwired his car.

The trailer park looked deserted, except for two gray-black mongrels barking and yapping at the wheels of the BMW. Ronan was pretty sure this was where dreams came to die.

Blue scratched the back of her ear self-consciously. “At least his dad doesn’t appear to be here. I don’t think he’d be too happy to see me after what I did to his boy.” She nodded at Ronan’s Aglionby sweater. It was obscenely rumpled, just the way he always wore it. There was a bit of marinara sauce stain, just beneath the stitched raven crest. “You might wanna take that off before we go knocking on any doors here. People aren’t very kind to your type.”

He didn’t want to know exactly what type that was, if it was soft rich fuck boys like the common raven boy stereotype, or tough guy street thug from the strip mall parking lot. Either way, he stripped off his sweater and pulled off his mostly-off tie, before killing the engine. “You coming?”

Blue hesitated. Ronan remembered her story of having caused Adam’s parents to pull him out of their school. What could she have done, he wondered. Neither Blue nor Adam looked like they would get entangled in anything remotely illegal. At least not in the way Ronan had, with vandalism, petty crime, and (probably) felony car theft (was he lucky the car he stole was willed to him anyway or what?) Well, maybe the weed smoking from the previous night, but they probably wouldn’t have done it if Noah wasn’t passing it around anyway, and straight-laced Adam hadn’t even taken a hit.

“You should probably go ahead. I’ll hang around here for a while, see if any of his neighbors had seen him?”

Shrugging, Ronan got out of the car, locked it when Blue had also gone out, and walked to the front door. He had to sidestep a bunch of faded t-shirts that were hanging on a low clothesline on the front porch to dry. Sure enough, he recognized some of them as shirts Adam had worn to some of their practices. The door flew open before he could knock. Mrs. Parrish stood at the opening, half-consumed cigarette at the corner of her mouth. Her face was pinched and freckled and had nothing of the charm that Adam had, but the gray-blue eyes and dusty eyebrows gave away the relation.

“Adam’s out back,” she said, eyeing Ronan coldly, before taking her cigarette from her lips to drag on, and then closing the door again in his face.

Ronan flipped off the door, the action giving him little satisfaction, before he caught Blue’s eye and nodded towards the garage at the rear of the trailer. Blue cautiously picked through the dusty lawn, mindful of the craggy mud-colored grass that caught on the hem of her skirt. Together, they rounded the trailer to the covered garage behind it.

It was almost dark, and there was an overhead lamp swinging mildly in the stale breeze that wafted into the trailer park. The harsh incandescent light cast long shadows that jumped crazily with the movement of the light. The garage was cluttered with all manner of garbage related to fixing up cars. It smelled like burned rubber and grease. In the center of the space was a rusted, dark blue Ford pick-up, the wheels of which were flattened and deflated. This vehicle would probably never run again. In the middle of the flatbed of the truck, Adam Parrish sat, shirtless, with his back turned to them. He had an opened bottle of cheap rum, and a chipped plastic bowl with a roll of string. He appeared to be stitching something up.

When Ronan moved closer to see, he realized with a sinking feeling exactly what Adam was doing. There was another bowl on his other side, the far side from where Ronan and Blue stood, and it was filled with bloody cotton balls soaked in rum, and bits of bloodied glass.

Adam Parrish was stitching himself up.

He froze when he heard the clink of Ronan’s car keys at his belt, but didn’t turn around. Hazily, Ronan realized the darkness he thought were shadows cast by the swinging light on Adam’s back were actually bruises. He’d seen similar fading bruises that one time he and Noah had caught him in the showers. But the ones on his back right now, there on his left shoulder blade that jutted out like a clipped wing, there in the middle of his back, blooming purple and black and blue on the backdrop of pale skin and freckles, and there on his right side, where his rib cage ended, these bruises were all fresh.

“Not my first time on this rodeo,” he muttered, the hand holding up the needle gesturing absently to the bowl of bloody cotton. His thin shoulders shook as he took a shuddering breath, and went back to threading his needle on the large gash on his left arm.

Blue’s eyes were wide and black in the ugly yellow light. “Oh, Adam.”

Ronan found he didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t.

Adam still didn’t turn to face them. He finished stitching up his arm, and reached for a clean cotton ball, soaked it with rum and pressed it to his stitches, hissing when the alcohol bit into the cut flesh. He chucked that to the bowl of discarded cotton, took a fresh one, soaked it again, and pressed it somewhere to his front. The hissing got louder. So apparently, there was a bigger, deeper cut there. Ronan couldn’t stomach how unsanitary this looked.

This wasn’t just unfair. Ronan knew that a great many things in life was unfair. He liked to think that he had been exposed to enough ugliness since his father’s death to not be so innocent to pain and suffering, but what was going on with Adam now was not just unfair. It was obscene.

“You’re going to get tetanus sitting out here on this shitbox, dumbass,” he said quietly, unable to take his eyes away from the mound of bloody cotton balls. Horror had filled his stomach with bile and threatened to rise to his throat.

Adam’s shoulders began to shake again as he laughed humorlessly. It was a painful sound to hear, halfway to a sob, as if he was trying so hard to keep himself from crying. And he was mostly failing. “That’s okay, I couldn’t afford the sanitary alcohol to clean up.” He moved, slowly, lethargically, to screw the cap on the rum. “This, at least, is forty proof.”

“Jesus fuck.”

“Yeah,” Adam said softly. Once he was finished cleaning up, he reached for his t-shirt, discarded at the side of the pick-up, and in doing so, had to turn his face towards Blue and Ronan.

If street fights and backyard brawls with his brother had not weathered Ronan, he would have been completely sickened by the sight of Adam’s face. He looked like a bruise that grew a face and not the other way around. His right brow was split and stitched neatly, probably with the same needle and thread he had used on his stomach and arm, and he had covered this with a nondescript band-aid, just below that, a black eye bloomed. On the other side of his face, a larger, angrier red bruise painted over the freckles on his cheek, and below that, a smaller bruise at the corner of his downturned mouth. He had been crying, his face was still damp, and the tear stains muddied the freckles with the bruises. His only concession, it seemed, was that his nose was still intact, straight and pretty.

Blue covered her mouth to suppress the gasp of horror that escaped her lips. “Adam, you need to go to the hospital!”

He smiled unpleasantly at her as he pulled his shirt over his head, the action causing another universe of pain that Ronan could see came from stretching the fresh stitches at his sternum… was it just a trick of the light or were those bruises where he had stitched himself up too? Ronan was almost glad that the dim light in the garage didn’t allow Blue or him to see any more than they already could. He was sure there would be other healing bruises and cuts dotting the narrow expanse of Adam’s pale chest.

“I don’t have insurance, Blue. Why do you think I’m sitting out here instead of in an emergency room table?”

Blue’s eyes were shiny with tears that refused to fall. “I didn’t mean—“

Adam sighed impatiently. “Of course, you don’t. When does anyone ever mean anything they tell me? I don’t think you meant anything when he collapsed my ribs last year, did you?”

Blue shook her head violently. “No! That’s not—“

Adam just looked tiredly at her. “Whatever. That’s over. We’re over, just like you wanted.” He turned to Ronan, eyes narrowed, as if searching for the same horror, the same pitying glance. “Can you just please take her home? I don’t really have any time to deal with crying girls and shit right now.”

Ronan schooled his face into a stony glare, regarding Adam back with the same icy stare he was leveled. “You might want to cut back on the shit your parents feed you, Parrish. Garbage like that doesn’t suit you.” He turned and grabbed Blue’s wrist, dragging her out of the garage, pushing her back to into his car. She had started to cry softly.

“I didn’t do that to him, you have to believe me!”

Ronan only stared at her for a while, before reaching into the backseat and wrangling out Adam’s bicycle. He set the ugly, rusted collection of metal and rubber on the front porch of the doublewide, got back into his car and reversed out of the hellhole that Adam Parrish was born in.

If he or Blue had stayed just a moment longer, they would have heard the quiet sob of relief mixed with despair that escaped Adam Parrish’s lips. They would have seen him grimace in pain as his gingerly lifted himself off the truck’s flatbed, his dislocated shoulder almost breaking even with less than his body weight on it. They would have seen him cry silently as he picked up the bloody tatters of his pride and humanity and desperately try to clothe himself with it to keep the world at bay.

But Ronan kept driving, passing a similar looking pickup on the way out of the trailer park. In it was a man that looked nothing like Adam Parrish and everything like him. This was Adam’s monster. This was the secret. This was the cause of his disappearance from Blue’s school. This was the man who created the shattered pieces of the boy sitting in the flatbed truck. But this wasn’t his fight. It wasn’t Blue’s fight. Adam had drawn all the lots and decided this was what he wanted for his life.

Ronan kept driving until they reached the McDonalds drive-through, and he bought himself and Blue a Happy Meal that they ate in the heavy silence of the BMW, before he finally drove her home.

 

 

Some time later, in the middle of the night, long after Ronan had left Blue at her house, long after he had worked off the useless burst of furious energy in veins at fifty-over-the-limit, long after the speeding ticket, the moron who dared to race him pulled over by a traffic cop, long after he had forgiven Adam Parrish for keeping his secret, for not telling any of his friends about the bruises, long after he had finally decided that whatever Adam’s problems were, they were his to resolve and none of them could fix the shambles of his life for him, long after he had drunk himself stupid and finally, mercifully fell asleep the middle of the floor in his room in Monmouth, the incessant buzzing of his phone on silent-vibrate invaded troubled dreams of blood and bruises and freckled skin.

Ronan groped blindly in the dark, intending to hurl his phone to the nearest wall to show that the stupid device was never the boss of him. He opened his eyes and found it was Gansey, and it was his tenth call, among a long string of increasingly worried text messages.

“What, man? Some of us like to get some sleep sometime.” Ronan closed his eyes as he answered the phone and fell back to the floor.

Gansey’s voice was quiet on the other line. “Not you, though.”

“Fuck you, I was already asleep.”

“Oh, sorry.” Thoughtful silence. He was sure Gansey was now calculating if Ronan would accept his apology with a fruit basket, or if he preferred a card. “How’s Parrish?”

Ronan grunted, utterly annoyed. “You called me in the middle of the night for this shit?”

Gansey at least had the decency to sound embarrassed. “You wouldn’t answer any of my texts or earlier calls.”

Another thoughtful silence. He didn’t really know if this was something he wanted to talk about. Adam had obviously not wanted to talk about it to anyone.

“Ronan?”

“Yeah,” he said softly, slowly sitting up, pulling himself up to his bed. His back hurt from sleeping on the floor. “I’m here.” Another pause. “He’s still alive, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He didn’t know whether Gansey took that to mean that Adam was okay, but there was relief in the voice on the other line. “Okay. What are you planning tomorrow, or later?”

Ronan just wanted to go back to sleep. But he supposed now that was impossible. “Church. Visit mom. I don’t know. Something.”

At least that seemed to finally get Gansey at ease. When he spoke next, he sounded completely relieved that Ronan had even bothered to take his phone call. “Okay. I’m driving back on Friday. I don’t really want to be here when the rest of the family talk about buying yachts and small countries.”

He smiled at that. Trust the Gansey family to think about buying small countries for their Black Friday sale. “Okay.” He ended the call as he was sure Gansey was also probably getting ready for bed.

He was mostly awake now, but the stream of ugly orange light from the street lamp outside told him it was too early for dawn, and he felt mostly dead inside as he considered everything he had seen again the night before. He didn’t know which was worse: his father’s death or the fact that Adam’s father beat him to a pulp on a regular basis, that Adam could laugh darkly about stitching himself up multiple times.

His phone buzzed again. Savagely, he picked it up and yelled, “Fuck, Gansey, I’m trying to sleep!”

“Blue called me, Ronan.” It was Noah, and he sounded like he had been crying. “You have to do something about Adam.”

Ronan lifted his head up and banged it on the edge of his bed a few times. The mattress and pillows easily softened each blow, but the dull ache the action caused felt a little better than all of the conflicted feelings Noah’s voice called up now. He didn’t know why all of his friends were such meddling asses. Why couldn’t they keep their lives to themselves? Why did they need to embroil themselves in Ronan’s life? In Adam’s life?

He sighed finally, when the sound of muffled crying brought him back to the call. Hearing Noah cry like Blue had was a little disturbing. Now he just felt like shit. And he wasn’t even the one who had gotten beaten up.

“Whatever, man. Let Adam sort his own life. I’m not his keeper.”

“But we’re his friends,” was Noah’s quiet reply. His voice was so soft, if it weren’t for the hiss of static, Ronan would have thought he imagined it.

“He hasn’t exactly been screaming for help.”

Noah huffed. “No, but he shouldn’t have to.”

The call ended. Ronan let his phone clatter to the floor and hoped no one else would call him again until it was time to get up and get ready for Mass.

When he could truly no longer fall asleep, Ronan got up, found his music sheets on a haphazard pile on the mountain of mess on his desk, and began to write.


	7. Tied Together With a Smile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Adam writes a song.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Graphic description of abuse and drug use.

By the time the morning Thanksgiving Mass service ended, Ronan was already determined to get as shitfaced as he possibly could. The charged air that circulated in the domes of St. Agnes church felt oppressive, made him breathless, like swimming through the carbon dioxide of a hundred other bodies in a fish tank. The crescendo of voices from the choir box made him light-headed, and he wanted to wipe the dour, disapproving glare on Declan’s face the minute he had shown up at the church doors with a solid knuckle to the jaw. He probably would have too, if Matthew hadn’t also shown up and urged his older brothers to be holy. 

They hadn’t even been to see his mother yet.

There probably wasn’t enough alcohol sold in Henrietta to prevent a Lynch brothers’ reunion from turning into a street fight. There was too much bad blood between the two brothers for any holiday to pass without each meeting ending in fists to jaws and knees to stomachs. Declan despised Ronan for having clearly been favored by their father, not just in life but also in death. Everything—the car, the estate, the fucking trust fund, care of their mother (Ronan didn’t even know one could will another person to his children; wasn’t that white slavery?)—went to Ronan. The eldest and youngest Lynch brothers got pittances for their existence. Declan was only executor until Ronan turned eighteen, and as that day drew nearer, so the hatred between brothers grew. Ronan couldn’t understand how exactly that favor was his fault. It wasn’t like he had asked Niall Lynch to will every fucking thing they owned to him. So he hated Declan for hating him. And he hated himself for hating his brother. And like any Lynch brothers reunion, Thanksgiving morning rapidly descended into a clusterfuck of epic proportions, beginning with the way his tie was on crooked.

“It’s just a shitty tie, Dec,” Matthew had reasoned weakly from his end of the pew.

Declan had shot both his younger brothers a look of pure venom. Ronan had grinned nastily and tugged at the silken fabric as if it strangled him, until it finally came undone. And then he proceeded to kick it under their pew, where a doddering old lady wearing a black lace veil and smelling like moth-eaten old newspapers had stepped on it, and the fabric caught in the grooves of her left shoe. She dragged Ronan’s tie all around the church when she went to do her offering, and again for communion, until some kind soul from the front row had taken pity on her, and had stepped on the tie as she passed his pew. The fabric finally came loose from the old lady’s shoes, but then it was left in the church center aisle until the entire service had ended. Mercifully, no other doddering old fuck had accidentally stepped on it to meet an early end slipping on the marble tiles.

Ronan did not bother to pick the tie up. He strolled out of the church casually, still tugging at the neck of his dress shirt, undoing one, then two buttons, and relishing small victories. It was only 8 o’clock, but God, did he need a drink, or ten.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Declan demanded as Ronan flagrantly ignored the open door to Declan’s Volvo. The car demanded silently for him to get in and toe the line. Ronan wanted to set it on fire. “Ronan, for once in your miserable life, can you please just listen and get in the car? Mom’s visiting hours cut in half because of the holiday.”

 Ronan waved a careless hand. “Whatever, man. Go try to convince mom to do something about dad’s will. I don’t care.” Now he wanted to get shitfaced _and_ high. Where was Noah when he needed him?

 If the churchyard wasn’t still crowded with the faithful, Declan would probably have decked him then and there. The look he shot Ronan was pure hate. “I really hope you’d make yourself fucking worthy of it all sometime.”

Ronan did not turn around. Declan fumed for a few more moments before slamming into his car. Ronan thought he saw Matthew cast him a mournful glance. His Thanksgiving was ruined, thanks to Ronan. But Ronan was always ruining shit for his family anyway. It was what he did best. _He_ ’d been the one to cry to everyone about finding their dead dad on the front yard. _He’d_ been the one who had nearly wrecked the BMW driving drunk on the highway, the shock of that incident compounding the horror of Niall Lynch’s death and driving Aurora Lynch into catatonia. _He’d_ been the one who had slit his wrists, who had nearly died of alcohol poisoning. Ronan didn’t need reminders of what a fucking monster he had become since his father’s death.

“At least come visit mom later when we’re not there?” Matthew said softly. He held out for an answer for a few heartbeats. When Ronan only stared at him stony silence, he sighed and quietly got into Declan’s car.

The Volvo peeled out of the church parking lot in a cacophony of dust and screeching tires.

Shitfaced, high, and speeding down the highway fifty over the limit. That was what he fucking needed.

 

 

He intended to go back to Monmouth first to find his fake ID. There was no more booze to be had there—they had consumed every last bottle, including the six-pack he hid under his bed from Gansey’s prying eyes—and he needed to replenish his stock, probably buy out all the liquor stores he could find in town, in lieu of turkey and cornucopias, but all the stores he passed on the way to church had been closed. Precious few establishments were unshuttered on Thanksgiving; only twenty-four hour convenience stores aimed to prepare rural America for the zombie apocalypse were ever open on holidays, and sometimes not even, or their shelves would be picked clean by last-minute shoppers looking for a quick bite. He decided to try his luck anyway on the nearest store he could find open.

The air in the store smelled stale, like a rat had died behind one of the shelves years ago and had mummified and left its stench permanently imprinted in the peeling whitewash paint. The store’s shelves were sparse, like a zombie apocalypse really had swept through Henrietta. Briefly, Ronan entertained the idea of zombies lining up at the cash register to purchase canned beans. Maybe zombies liked the taste of Spam and microwave dinners.

There was no one at the register counter, and that was where all the booze and cigarettes were locked, but the storeroom back door was open, and he could hear quiet shuffling from inside. Maybe the cashier was the Patient 0, and Ronan needed to go all Resident Evil on the store. He wondered if sub-machine guns magically appear from behind convenience store shelves like it did for Milla Jovovich.

 Maybe pull-tabs on canned meat were invented for zombies not to learn how to use can-openers.

 A string of half-whispered swears erupted from the depths of the storeroom. Ronan wanted to call management to complain about the awful service, when the lone store employee finally emerged from the storeroom, patting dust off one t-shirt covered thin shoulder, pressed down with the strap of an arm-sling.

 “Gimme a Gudang and Guin—Parrish,” he greeted abruptly.

Adam Parrish stiffened where he stood by the storeroom door. His hand, the one attached to his uninjured arm and good shoulder, dropped from favoring his dislocated one, fingers curling into a fist. His black eye looked livid. The injured rabbit look in his doe eyes darkened into suspicion, lips tightening into a thin pale line, punctuated with a bruise.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Ronan rolled his eyes. Well, this was going to get ugly real fast. “Buying cigarettes and beer like a normal human being. Why the fuck are you here? Don’t you get sick leave?”

Adam almost laughed and shot him a look of disdain. “And what universe have you been living in, Lynch?” He sighed tiredly, shut the door behind him, and pushed past Ronan to get back to his post at the cash register. “I don’t work, I don’t get paid. Simple as that.”

“You’re half-dead,” Ronan pointed out. 

“Mostly dead,” Adam replied. He fished for a textbook, some paper and a pen from the shelf under the cash register. Even in the middle of a work-shift on Thanksgiving Day, Adam Parrish was chasing Ivy League dreams.

“Point,” Ronan conceded. He tugged out his leather bands from under the cuff of his dress shirt and started to chew on them. “So are you going to sell me cigarettes or do I need to call management?” 

Adam ignored him. “Show me legit ID, and stop being a fuckwad in my store.”

“ _You_ stop being a fuckwad. Gimme my fucking cigarettes and I won’t call management for your bad service.”

 Finally, fucking finally, Adam Parrish began to smile, a real one, not the half-grimace he had been managing. “Eat shit, Lynch.”

 Ronan grinned back at him, teeth like knives. “Well, looks like I’m going to have to rob your store then, Parrish.”

 In the end, Adam did _not_ sell him any cigarettes or beer or any other merchandise over-privileged sixteen-year-old Raven boys were not meant to have if the world functioned like justice existed, and real-world rules applied to snotty trust fund babies. He did allow Ronan to sit on the counter with his boots up, and split his sandwich with him when Ronan complained that he was hungry (and somehow did not want to eat any of the edibles sold at the store.) Ronan sat quietly enjoying his half of Adam’s soggy tuna sandwich, content to spend the rest of the morning in quiet commiseration with Adam’s equally quiet existence.

 When Adam’s shift finally ended at 11, Ronan jumped off the counter without another word and left him in the store, just as the next employee taking over Adam’s shift walked into the store, rebuke on her lips at the sight of boot prints on the glass panel. He crossed to the churchyard casually, whistled a jaunty tune, something Irish and reminded him of his father. The church office was still open, but the nuns that manned the office had left the desks to prepare to move to the church in the next town for the evening service there, probably a soup kitchen to be run. Ronan found what he was looking for and swiped the flyer, folded it into fours, and slipped the piece of paper into his back pocket, before finally walking out to his car. He had places to be that day, starting with the assisted living facility in Richmond, where his mother waited.

* * *

 

Thanksgiving, like most celebratory holidays, meant only that there was no school to escape to from life in the trailer park, so Adam had taken every work shift he could get wherever he could get it. Only the convenience store was open. The factory had closed down for the holidays—no foreman wanted to spend any more time with the grubby, mournful faces of minimum wage workers. Boyd’s Auto Shop would not reopen until Monday. But the convenience store was one person short for the late night shift, so Adam had agreed to take both his usual morning shift and the night shift. It meant he could leave home at 6, and not have to come back until 10PM. He had hoped the library would be open so he could at least get some homework done in between work shifts, but he supposed even librarians had family to go home to for Thanksgiving.

 Ronan showing up in the middle of his morning shift all prim and haughty in his fancy pressed shirt and dress pants, his Sunday best, had been an unexpected treat. Adam did not expect to see any of his friends anymore after they’d stumbled on his secret. He didn’t think they would have anything to do with him anymore after he ruined a perfectly fun, happy, triumphant night by showing up black and blue to school the next day, so he had decided to skip.

 The truth was, since the last year when Robert Parrish had savagely beaten his son with a wrench (it happened to be the first thing he had grabbed when Adam had shown up at home ten minutes later than his curfew, flush and happy with having kissed Blue, having kissed a _girl_ for the first time in his life), broken a few bones and nearly bashed his face in if the neighbor’s dog hadn’t started yapping at his heels, the blows had been fewer, more measured, aimed to hurt, but not to maim. Adam’s mother had panicked when he had been unable to peel himself off the dirt in the garage. She had called another neighbor, who called another neighbor, who brought him to the resident meth dealer. Apparently, meth dealers knew how to set bones. Maybe it was an occupational hazard when they had run-ins with the cops, or maybe turf wars got ugly sometimes and broken bones would be had. But the meth dealer in the Antietam Lane trailer park had set Adam’s bones just fine, patched his skin with whatever dirty bandages he found in his lab, and shot him up with badly cut heroin when he would not stop screaming from the pain, before carting him off in a half-broken dolly back to his parents’ house and collecting two hundred dollars from his dad, the first hundred for the trouble, the second probably to cover the cost of drugs.

 That had been his first and final brush with illegal substances. 

Adam had been out of his mind for days. Every time he tried to remember what had happened in the intervening hours of pain and blackness, his mind drew up a blank. It was like he existed but there was no consciousness in the existence, like a waking coma, and it was impossible to be free from it until the drugs had finally run out of his system. One of his other neighbors had told him that they had seen him sitting in the rusted pick-up, eyes about to pop off the sockets, awake but not alive. They told him that he had stared and stared into the dust until his mother would pick him out of the truck and put him back to bed. They told him he would walk out of the doublewide at night, and kick at the dusty trees with his bare feet before someone else would find him and walk him back home and deposit him to drool on the ratty loveseat couch that smelled of cheap cigarettes and sweat in their tiny living room until morning. They told him he had been like that for a week, maybe two. The stories got taller with each retelling, so he never could recall which ones were real and which were complete bullshit. He was sure the kicking trees with bare feet was a psychedelic drug reaction, and anyway, there had been no splinters on his toes when he finally came to himself. What he did have, though, was acute dehydration. He had apparently spent the entire high vomiting any food he ingested, and by the time it finally wore off, his face was peeling and his limbs refused to cooperate. 

It took weeks before he could function normally again, broken ribs notwithstanding. By then, he learned his mother had called his school and withdrawn him from enrollment (she did it the second day from the time he had been beaten because everyone thought he was going to die anyway, why waste good money on his education). It was two months of sitting in his bed feeling pathetic, his life spiraling out of his control, and all over ten minutes past his curfew. When he was finally well enough to get on with his life, he decided he would take the time off from school to plan his future, because damned if Adam Parrish did not go to an Ivy League school, in spite of the dust, in spite of the poverty, the trailer park, the broken bones, the broken spirit. Or maybe it was because of it.

 He didn’t know what his mother had told the school district with regard to his withdrawal. Maybe she told them he had a heart attack in his sleep and died. Maybe she told them he had been abducted by aliens. Both explanations were infinitely more plausible than being beaten to within an inch of his life and sewn up by a drug dealer for two hundred dollars and change. But he had needed to undo all of that. He had set his sights on Aglionby Academy because the raven boys who ruled the streets of Henrietta were his false gods. They drove the fanciest cars, fucked the prettiest girls, and sped off to their Ivy League dreams on the wings of their trust funds once the school days ran out. Adam was going to be that person some day, and he would fight and claw and kill himself for that future if that’s what it took.

 So when he had finally passed the admission exams (there were many of them, with essays and panel interviews and a lot of talking to former school teachers to convince them he was not a ghost, that he still lived in the state, and that he just needed a recommendation), he decided he needed funding for his schooling. Whatever money that his parents had set aside for his education had already evaporated into pinup calendars of half-naked women with plastic breasts, so he needed to make money himself. It was easy to get a job if one was a minor and willing to work for minimum wage and no insurance. The factory gig, and eventually through his father’s good graces, the auto shop work, scraped enough for half a year of education. When Aglionby told him he would receive a scholarship, even a partial one, he wanted to find the phone number that would connect him to God so he could grovel in his relief.

 He hadn’t quite counted on making any friends in the middle of it all. There was too much to do: studying, and exams and papers and quizzes, a B average grade to maintain, work and work and work. He meant to keep his head down and skim through the charmed raven boy life unnoticed until graduation, and then he would kick into high gear in Harvard or Princeton or Yale. Somewhere far and remote, and fancy-sounding, where his father’s fists would never be able to reach him. And then he met Gansey. And then he met Ronan Lynch. Or he met Ronan Lynch’s music.

 That, over anything else, over reconnecting with Blue (without the bile and hatred he had hurled on her on Wednesday night, of course!), over the easy friendship that Noah offered, over the sometimes over-the-top mothering he and everyone else in their band, received from Gansey, over the absurd crush that he was sure Ronan had on him, had tilted his universe. Hearing that one instrumental that Ronan had composed had sealed his fate.

 And he had liked it.

And Adam Parrish may have hated that they had discovered his secret. He may have hated that they pitied his poverty-stricken bruised trailer trash face. He may have hated that they would forevermore associate him as his father’s punching bag, that they—his friends—had had a hand in causing him to become one that Wednesday morning when he came home smelling of weed that his mother thought he had been back at the meth dealer so his father had decided to teach him a lesson or two about drug use, except there were no instructional manuals, just more broken bottles hurled in his general direction, fists punctuated with “Are you even listening to me, you stupid piece of trash!” 

But he would always come back to them for that music. That was what was important. That was what Adam was thankful for. Thanksgiving this year made him a little sentimental. It felt like a real holiday for the first time in his seventeen years.

So when he walked out of the convenience store that morning, intending to find a quiet place in the park to finish up the homework he had started, his stomach growling at the inadequate half of a sandwich he had eaten, no thanks to Ronan Lynch, he found himself instead walking to Monmouth Manufacturing. The parking lot was deserted: Ronan had not gone home after leaving him at the convenience store, and Adam was sure Gansey and Noah had left Henrietta to spend the holidays with their families. But that was okay. He didn’t need an audience for this now. He was sure before long that he would have an audience for it anyway.

He climbed the steps quietly and stopped in front of the door. Gansey had taught him how to shimmy it open in case he wanted to let himself in and none of its occupants were around. It was a sign of trust, of true friendship. Gansey wanted Adam in his life. He wanted Adam in his friends’ lives, and that had to mean he was worth something.

Adam just wanted the music.

He fished into his messenger bag and found the folded envelope of everything he had to say. Just as quietly as he had climbed the stairs, he slipped the envelope through the crack between the door and the floor, keeping just a tiny edge sticking out from under the door so that it would not go unnoticed, and whoever arrived there first would be able to see and find it easily.

Satisfied that his gift would be found, he turned on his heel, rubbed his hands, chapped and almost numb from the cold, and shoved it into the pockets of his jacket, and walked off. He’d go to the park and spend the next nine hours there working on his homework and Biology review until sunset. He’d take the rest of the holiday in stride when it happens. 

* * *

 

When Ronan got back to Monmouth that afternoon, he found the note slipped under the door. It was in Adam’s shaky, barely legible scrawl. Above each line were guitar chords, accompaniment to the piano piece he had written, the first piece of music he had created. Adam had breathed words into his creation and Ronan was not sure he understood its language well, but he smiled nonetheless. Maybe it wasn’t just the freckles. Maybe it was everything.

_My love_  
_It's been a long time since I cried and left you out of the blue  
It's hard leaving you that way when I never wanted to_

  
_Self denial is a game it's strange I never would've wanted 'til there was you_  
_'Cause I have learned that love is beyond what human can imagine,_  
_The more it clears  
The more I gotta let you go_

_'Cause what I don't understand_  
_Is why I'm feeling so bad now_  
_When I know it was my idea_  
_I could've just denied all the truth and lied  
And why am I the only one standing stranded on the same ground_

 He folded the note, and stuffed it back inside the envelope, which joined the four-folded flyer in the back pocket of his pants. He didn’t want to share the music. He wanted to treasure it alone and in silence for a while, this beautiful, magical thing that Adam had created, even in the midst of his wretchedness.

Maybe Ronan could hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song referenced here is [Same Ground](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iddMLJ53x_M) by Kitchie Nadal. IMO, she has better songs in Filipino, but it's a pain to translate to English.


	8. Today Was A Fairy Tale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Adam's mom becomes a Stacy's mom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have updated tags as well as rating because some scenes are really disturbing. Not really on this chapter, but on the previous 2 chapters.

The public library was open on Black Friday, and this was where Adam went to after his morning convenience store shift. Henrietta, on Black Friday, was like any other town in consumerist America: everyone swarming the local Target to get the best deals on electronics that would not last until Christmas, and throwaway apparel and toys that would be in the bargain bin by the next weekend. The public library, situated in the middle of town, nestled among quaint shops selling buttery pastries and raven-themed gift items was a common meeting place among the tourists and locals alike, after a long morning of hawking goods and bargaining for rock-bottom prices.

Adam found Blue sitting on the steps, eating candy cloud and blocking his escape route to books and solitude.

Her eyebrow quirked when she spotted him and his shoulders hunched in anticipation of another fight. All the bruises on his face throbbed and he pursed his lips and nodded in greeting. _Don't fight, don't fight, don't fight._

"Hey," she greeted, face obscured by the giant pink cloud that was rapidly shrinking.

"Hey," Adam said, stopping awkwardly just in front of her so she was forced to crane her neck just to look at him.

Blue cocked an annoyed eyebrow as she reached for a fat paper bag at her side and handed it to him. Adam opened the bag. It was a blue candy cloud on a rolled paper stick.

"Would you sit down?" she groused, snapping at the edges of her candy cloud between her lips so that the cloud moistened and turned into dark pink colored sugar. "You're entirely too far up there for me to talk to."

Adam settled next to her and took out the candy she had given him. He held the paper stick with his bad hand, and gingerly pinched a small amount with his good hand and stuffed the candy in his mouth. It felt weird, like crackling rock candy, when it hit his lips. Once the candy powdered into sugar, it was sweet going down his throat. He felt thirsty suddenly and he wondered if, behind her cotton candy cloud, Blue was looking at the bruises on his face.

It certainly felt like it, with the way everything north of his neck throbbed painfully. She didn't say anything, just quietly continued to eat her candy. It felt like all the noise of the Black Friday sale had suddenly gone mute. Adam thought his head was going to implode.

"I'm sorry," he blurted out finally, unable to take the silence. As soon as the words tumbled out of his mouth, sound resumed in a gradual trickle of white noise.

Blue twirled her candy. There was less than half of it left on the stick and it looked like a demolished mushroom cloud. "You didn't do anything wrong, Adam." Her voice was kind. It made Adam want to hide. He didn't want to hear that kindness. "It's okay."

Adam didn't think it was okay. He didn't know how to not be attracted to her. "I was a dick. it wasn't your fault." He looked at his feet. His sneakers were impossibly scuffed and dirty. Maybe he should wash it. The red canvas looked brown with all the dirt. He sighed and added, "Not any of it. None of what happened had anything to do with you at all."

She nodded and finished her candy, then stood up, smiling, as if he hadn't said anything, as if he hadn't disappeared on her for at least a year. "Orla and I are busking. Wanna join us?"

No hesitation. Blue was his friend. If he couldn't be with her, he could be her friend. If he didn't know how to not be attracted to her, he could at least still be her friend. And that would be enough. "Yes." He smiled back at her, aware that the candy cloud tinged his lips and teeth blue and feeling utterly childish for it. "I can't play though. Shoulder's not cooperating with my guitar strap."

Blue snorted. "Of course not. You're singing, because I sure as hell won't be."

_Today was a fairy tale_  
_You’ve got a smile that takes me to another planet_  
_Every move you make everything you say is right  
Today was a fairy tale_

_Today was a fairy tale_  
_All that I can say is now it’s getting so much clearer_  
_Nothin’ made sense ‘til the time I saw your face  
Today was a fairy tale_

_Time slows down whenever you’re not around._  
_But can you feel this magic in the air?_  
_It must have been the way you kissed me_  
_Fell in love when I saw you standing there._  
_It must have been the way  
Today was a fairy tale_

* * *

 

Noah arrived at Monmouth long before Gansey did. Unable to keep still during his family’s Thanksgiving dinner, he had thrown an overnight bag into his older sister’s silver Audi, fished the keys out of her coat pocket while she was steadily getting drunk on eggnog, and took off in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a green pea coat thrown over flannel Hello Kitty pajamas borrowed from his younger sister. His exposed ankles felt unbearably cold in the pitch blackness of the sleepy Long Island night. He couldn’t find his shoes, so he had settled for the fluffy bunny slippers he found in front of the second floor powder room (probably another thing he’ll have to pay his little sister for, when he next came back to New York). His right foot kept slipping out of the slipper, every time he toed the brakes. It was a good thing his parents hadn’t broken out the good wine when he sneaked away, otherwise he would have felt bad missing the best part of Thanksgiving dinner, but he thought that right now, his friends needed him the most.

He stopped over at a quiet bed and breakfast just off the freeway from Baltimore. The motel owners were an old couple, who had a pre-teen daughter, and she had stared and stared at the giant winking, mouthless Japanese cartoon cat stitched on the butt of his pajama pants, until Noah had turned and waved cheerily at her. The old couple thought maybe he was a serial killer with an unhealthy kitty obsession, but they had handed over the keys to a room, and Noah was able to change into normal clothing the next morning. They were probably normal by his standards, since red checkered bondage pants weren’t popular except among Suicide Squad kink cosplayers, but at least he found normal shoes in the trunk of Esther’s car. His eldest sister was in college and into blue collar chic. She probably dated a plumber or a fireman—that was always a sore discussion point in family dinners, but her boyfriend, Greg, had good taste in shoes. Noah liked the purple Doc Martens he’d given her for her last birthday, and he liked it even more that the boots fitted his socked feet like a dream.

He brushed his teeth with the dental kit he found in his room’s tiny bathroom, flossed and checked his mouth. The night he had arrived, he had met with some school friends from middle school who had dared him to get a tattoo after seeing some photos of him with Ronan and Adam and Gansey. He thought that was passé: Ronan already had the best shit inked on his back and anything Noah ever got would just be sorry and lame in comparison, so he decided to get his face pierced instead. In several different places.

He already wore three black steel studs at the top of his left ear. The fleur-de-lis stud on the right side of his nose was a pretty addition. Too bad it was on the opposite side; he could have chained them all up and pretended to be an albino Indian bride. The one on his tongue though, that had been a bitch to get, because it meant he couldn’t eat solid food for at least a day while it healed. His Thanksgiving dinner was spent talking with a lisp as he got used to the ball stud in the middle of his mouth, clinking awkwardly against the back of his front teeth. All he could have was soup. It sucked pretty badly. But by morning, it was getting better and he felt mostly badass about himself, and he tried to check himself in the bathroom mirror if maybe he could glower fiercely like Ronan would, but all that accomplished was make him look as threatening as a shih tzu puppy yapping at strangers.

Having freshened up quickly, he paid for his stay, waved back at the pre-teen who continued to worship the ground he walked on and drove off. He had planned to pick Gansey up at DC, but then remembered his racist grandmother would probably be at a Gansey Thanksgiving family reunion, and Noah would really not like to hear Holocaust denial tirades all Friday afternoon.

By 4 o’clock, he was pulling up in front of Monmouth Manufacturing. The parking lot was deserted, save for his red Mustang. He didn’t know what Ronan did on Thanksgiving, especially with Gansey not around, but if he wanted to stage an Adam Parrish intervention, he was sure he was going to at least need Ronan to knock some sense into their friend, especially if Gansey was indisposed. It was one of the sad realities of being one Noah Czerny. He was the eldest among his friends (and the best!) but none of them ever listened to him unless backed up by someone else who threw a lot more weight than he did.

Torn between wanting to find Ronan and sulking inside his room, Noah decided he would just sit and pout by the skate ramp he and Ronan had constructed last summer. Someone would be along any time now.

Noah was able to sit still for all of seven minutes before he decided to just wing it. He was sure Ronan would never show up home this early in the afternoon and it would be too much to hope that Gansey would magically be able to wriggle out of his family obligations. He didn’t even know if Gansey knew about Adam. He assumed Blue must have called them both, but he never heard back from anyone except Ronan who had completely shot down the idea of trying to help Adam in any way. Really, his friends wouldn’t survive high school without him.

Getting to Antietam Lane was the easy part. He had switched out to his Mustang before leaving Monmouth parking lot. He didn’t think it would be believable to drive Esther’s shiny new Audi to the middle of bumfuck Virginia and pretend he was out of gas or having car trouble, but the Mustang had been sitting in the open lot for at least two nights and had weathered Tuesday’s hail storm rather well. The car was still hot and shiny and fancy and new (precious few things Noah owned were not), but the scuff here and there from bouncing off the fender with his skateboard when trying new tricks, and the light dusting of pollen on the hood and roof lent it just the right amount of nouveau riche chic that appealed to the unwashed masses.

He stopped just beyond the cluster of rusted mailboxes on the side of the road, right next to the gutted driveway that led to the trailer park. The late afternoon breeze would be cool but he could probably weather another hour without his jacket, so he shucked that off and left it in the back seat, took a split second to unbutton the top three buttons of his dress shirt and pull up the corner of one starched collar. He tipped his rear view mirror to check his hair, ruffling the platinum locks to just this side of rakish charm, shut off the engine and sauntered out of his car to sit on the hood. The metal wafted heat up his ass and threatened to kill his future of having any children at all, but Noah reminded himself that this was all for a good cause.

He even had the fall breeze working for him as it tousled is already ruffled curls lightly. He looked like a poster boy for a soft porn magazine, because he was too thin and pale to be a cover model for a romance novel.

Right on cue, he glimpsed movement from behind the line of dusty trees, before a figure emerged from the depths of the trailer park. Noah didn’t have to look to see that it was Adam’s mom. She possessed the same timid, deer caught in headlights look, though unlike Adam, her face had hardened through years of poverty. She had the same stormy blue eyes as she regarded him with naked curiosity. The unlit cigarette she had been holding to the corner of her lips was forgotten, and almost slipped off if she hadn’t caught it and struggled for a full minute to bring her lighter up, light her cancer stick and take a long calming drag.

Noah almost rolled his eyes. Damn, Adam’s family had a lot of serious issues.

“You’re blocking our driveway,” Mrs. Parrish finally said as she reached the edge of the driveway to stand in front of his car. Up close, Noah could see where the similarities with Adam truly ended. Fire and ice always lurked in the storm of Adam’s doe eyes. Mrs. Parrish’s were just flat. Like the dust of the trailer park had finally beaten her into submission, and after that, no soul was left to look out of them. Noah hoped he wasn’t too late.

He turned to her slowly and made a huge show of raking his fingers through his hair in frustration. “I’m sorry, ma’am. My car broke down and I just don’t know what to do!” He wrung his hands for effect, the action perfectly calculated to the lilting whine of his statement.

Mrs. Parrish’s eyes narrowed. Noah smiled at her apologetically, a soft curl of pale lips over straight, white teeth. Winning.

When she backed away, he knew he had gotten her. “My son knows a thing or two about cars. Maybe he can help you.”

She retreated into the trailer park, and Noah hastily jumped off his car. Damn, that engine sure burned his balls. This was going to hurt for days. It didn’t take long: Mrs. Parrish may have no soul left but even she couldn’t resist helping a handsome young stranger at the side of the road. He hoped she wouldn’t come back out with Adam—that would really put a damper on Noah’s plans.

Thankfully, Adam emerged from the cluster of trees alone. He hadn’t changed out of the dirty cargo pants he usually used when working in his father’s garage. His hair was a mess, and there was a bit of engine grease smeared across his cheek. So he had indeed been working in the back. He walked in a slow shuffle, picking through the ruts in the dusty ground. His left arm was in a sling, probably to keep from jostling his shoulder.

When Blue told him that Adam was a mess, Noah thought immediately of the kids who were bullied in his middle school back in New York, how they had looked mournful and suicidal and angry with the world. That didn’t prepare him for the hooded, hunted look in Adam Parrish’s eyes. His thin shoulders hunched warily when he recognized the Mustang, his mouth opening, then shutting, speechless.

Finally, Adam settled for a sullen “What’re you doing here?”

Noah grabbed Adam by the arms, silent apology in the glint of gray eyes, and shoved Adam into the passenger seat of his car, rounded to the driver’s side, and got in. The smile he flashed Adam could almost rival Ronan’s sharp-edged grin, all sharp teeth and knives, like a hissing cat.

“I’m here to kidnap you, Adam Parrish. You need a break.” He started the car and reversed through the driveway, jostling Adam even more with the jerky driving, before he was speeding off the highway back to Monmouth Manufacturing.

“Also, in case it hasn’t occurred to you yet, your mom’s probably having an affair. She likes younger men.”

Adam glared at him in silent fury for the rest of the car ride.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song here is Today Was A Fairy Tale, also by Taylor Swift. Sorry, I have a one-track mind.


	9. Style

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Adam and Gansey see more than what they bargained for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fanfic is already completed. I will try to format everything for posting every other day to finish this.

In hindsight, Ronan should have probably realized the whole Adam Parrish affair would blow up in his face. For starters, Noah and Gansey were involved. And for finishers, Noah and Gansey were involved and that absolutely meant a clusterfuck of cosmic proportions where poor boy Parrish was concerned, especially when the beneficiary of the intervention the two of them were trying to stage had absolutely no interest in seeking any manner of assistance or comfort from his friends. Adam Parrish seemed perfectly content to live and die under the crushing weight of his father’s fists. Maybe Parrish had a shame kink. One could never know anymore with kids these days.

It was late when he drove back into Henrietta: the Black Friday traffic around Richmond, where he had been to see his mother, and Virginia Beach, where he had been to kill time racing with beach bound locals, had been abominable. Nerves frayed, patience burned dangerously below sane, Ronan was not quite ready for the shit show that was Adam Parrish’s fury. He could hear yelling coming from the general direction of the building, and the vein in his temple throbbed as he realized with a sinking feeling when he saw three vehicles parked in the lot, that Noah and Gansey were in there, and that hysterical voice screaming bloody murder was Adam, possibly abducted by Noah, possibly about to tear the apartment down.

Gansey and Noah were standing in the middle of the room, trying to reason with Adam, who had his back turned to the door. Noah wrung his hands helplessly, glancing entreatingly at Gansey every few seconds. Gansey had adopted a stern, no-nonsense expression that Ronan had come to associate as his dad face, a look which Ronan had more than once been on the receiving end. It had usually ended with Ronan sullenly acquiescing to Gansey’s wishes to exert control and order into his life. Ronan was perfectly content to let Gansey hand-hold him through his depression in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, but Adam clearly had issues relinquishing that control.

And Adam having issues was a gross understatement. His shoulders were hunched and shaking, his ears red, hands clenched and unclenched in barely contained fury. He whirled on his feet on hearing the door and crooked one accusing finger to Ronan’s face.

“YOU!” Adam’s eyes were wild with rage. Ronan was sure he would have hurled himself on him if Adam were inclined to violence and Ronan grinned nastily at him, goading his anger, his own muscles coiling for a fist fight. This could be good. “How dare you show up here.”

Ronan’s smile widened. Noah’s eyes were widening in panic. “I live here, Parrish. You might’ve forgotten that.”

Adam wasn’t placated. There was a universe of hate in every word that Adam Parrish spat to his face. “I trusted you not to tell anyone!”

“Wasn’t me, you dumb fuck,” Ronan replied, waving a careless hand at Gansey and Noah. “Why don’t you ask your  _ girlfriend _ who told on you getting your ass handed to you by your dad?” He shrugged. “Besides, not like we all can’t see what happened to you. People don’t dislocate shoulders and break their fucking faces falling off stairs, dumbass. How many times do you want us to fall for that ‘I’m clumsy as a Disney princess’ shit before we manage to string two ideas together, Parrish?”

If anything, this seemed to set Adam off even more, but it appeared he had completely gone beyond rational thought and could barely force out the cold “Fuck you, Lynch,” before he threw one last venomous look at Gansey and Noah, and stormed out of the apartment.

Gansey put an exasperated hand to his bone-weary face, voice tight with frustration and worry. It occurred to Ronan that his friend had probably just arrived from a long drive from DC, and the first thing he had to do was play peace-maker among his friends. Ronan almost felt bad for him, but he forced the emotion down. Gansey brought this shit on himself for daring to insinuate support for Adam Parrish, boy, interrupted.

“Don’t worry, Ronan,” Gansey said softly. He put a reassuring hand on Ronan’s shoulder as he made for the door. “I’ll fix this.”

And then he was gone, swallowed up by the night to follow Adam Parrish in the hope that their friend would listen to reason. Ronan kicked the nearest object by his foot. Gansey’s steel trashcan tumbled to the side, upended and scattered random pieces of crumpled paper and other trash on the floor. Noah cringed, and stared after Ronan with wide, swimming, imploring eyes.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Ronan snarled. Dimly, he wondered how he never noticed there were flecks of gold in the gray of Noah’s eyes, which had widened even more. He looked almost comical, like a cartoon character with eighty percent of his face all gray irises and blond eyelashes. Ronan wanted to break things.

“I’m sorry, Ronan.” Noah’s voice was quiet and full of regret. “I thought he’d listen to me.”

“ _ Fuck _ ,” Ronan roared, frustration tipping dangerously. He didn’t know what else to do with the sudden surge of furious Parrish-inspired energy crackling in his fingertips so he grabbed Noah’s face and kissed him angrily, teeth nipping, tongue chasing after the other boy’s breath. Noah started, a small sound escaping the back of his throat infuriating Ronan even more, before his large swimming eyes rolled shut and he relaxed into the kiss. There was something weird in the kiss, something Ronan hadn’t quite felt before. It felt cold and impersonal. It left a fiery hunger in the pit of his stomach that he longed to quench with more savage kisses.

When Ronan pulled back, Noah was smiling wickedly. “Cool shit, huh?” He stuck his tongue out and Ronan realized that the weird sensation was from a ball-shaped piercing in the middle of Noah’s tongue. His tongue curled to moisten his already glistening lips. Ronan had the distinct impression Noah was baiting him. “Now who’s the baddest mofo around?”

Ronan’s glare was murderous. “Didn’t I just say we’re not supposed to fucking talk about this shit again?”

Noah laughed at him.

* * *

 

Adam stalked down the stairs leading from the Monmouth main door, heels bouncing as he tore through the night air. His bruises throbbed and his shoulder hurt from the tenseness of his muscles. He forced himself to count to ten in slow measured breaths to try to calm his racing heart.

_ Fuck them, _ he thought savagely. What right did they have, Blue and Ronan, to talk about his problems with their other friends? Adam’s parents were his problem, no one else’s. The bruises on his face, cuts on his body, broken bones… none of them had anything to do with this, and they had no right to tell him what to do. His life wasn’t some reality show that these bored rich kids could just storm into to stage an intervention.

His fists continued to clench and unclench, and he had to stop walking for a while, his dislocated shoulder aching even more and that took the edge of his anger. Vaguely, he was aware that Gansey had followed him out, and Adam was torn on the thought of apologizing to his friend for yelling at him—really Gansey had just been caught in the crossfire of Adam’s flaring temper at Noah for knowing, and Blue and Ronan for telling, but the look of pity in his face hit Adam in the gut, harder than a physical blow, coiling a fist around his throat until he couldn’t breathe from the anger and shame. He didn’t want their pity.

Gansey and Noah and Blue and Ronan Lynch could shove that pity up their asses and fucking choke on it for all he cared.

“Adam!” Gansey called. He was still running after him. Adam walked faster. The muscles in his legs burned almost as hard as the hot tears in his eyes as they threatened to breach the dam of his fury.

“Leave me alone, Gansey,” he intoned, shoulders hunching as the November night wind picked up. It looked like it was going to rain.

“Adam, please, you don’t have your bike. At least let me take you home.” Gansey’s voice was quiet, pleading. He had stopped walking. “I’m not… I’m not going to force you out of your parents’ house if that’s what you want.”

Adam turned to face him. Gansey’s handsome face was contorted with confusion, like he couldn’t understand why Adam would continue to torture himself living with people who constantly trampled on his dignity. Like he couldn’t understand why Adam needed to be able to manage this life—his life!—by himself. Without charitable contributions from his friends because he absolutely did not need them.

“You don’t get it, Gansey. Look at you, and your preppy polos and your Topsiders. How do you expect to get what’s happening to me? I don’t  _ want  _ this. But I don’t want anyone else to have anything to do with it until I’m well and fucking done.”

Gansey’s brow furrowed. He opened his mouth, and then apparently changed his mind with what he had been about to say. “I… you’re right, of course. I wouldn’t presume to understand what you’re going through.” He sighed, and looked tiredly at Adam. “But it’s late, and I don’t think you can walk all the way here to your house. Please, Adam, just…” He waved carelessly to the general direction of where the four cars were parked. “Let me just get my keys. I’ll take you home.”

Adam opened his mouth to argue some more, not ready to let go of his anger. But Gansey appeared so tired. And Adam himself was tired. He was tired of being angry, tired of fighting, tired of being beaten to a pulp. He was so tired of hiding these things from his friends, hiding Adam Parrish, trailer trash, from these soft rich boys and their easy friendship. He didn’t want to go home; he just wanted to not be there to see their faces, to feel their pity every time they looked at his swelling black eye.

“Okay.”

Gansey nodded, and Adam followed him wearily to trudge back to Monmouth. They were halfway up the flight of stairs leading to the open front door when Gansey stopped walking and Adam ran into his back and hit his nose squarely on Gansey’s shoulder-blade.

“Ow,” he muttered, reaching up with his good hand to rub at his nose. Gansey’s back was like a brick wall, all stiff muscle and bone.

“Oh,” said Gansey quietly. Adam craned his neck to see over his friend’s shoulders. Gansey still wasn’t moving.

From inside the apartment, he could see Ronan gripping Noah’s face and kissing him hard. Noah kissed back hungrily, hand cupping the back of Ronan’s neck to pull him ever closer as if he would swallow him.  _ Oh _ , indeed.

Adam stepped back hastily. His chest suddenly burned from a distinct lack of air, as if hitting his nose had robbed him of the ability to breathe. He felt dizzy and his ears were hot with embarrassment from having witnessed such a passionate display of… of something. He didn’t know what. All he knew was that this was something he wasn’t quite ready to see, and now that he saw it, he couldn’t un-see it, and every muscle in his body tensed at the memory, and he felt something akin to raging waters rushing in his ears and licking at the edges of his vision.

“Well, that’s…” Gansey was apparently as unprepared as he was, deflating visibly against the metal railing of the stairs, like the air had been knocked out of his chest. He put a finger to his lip and turned away. “Let’s just give them a moment.”

Eventually, the sound of the door to Ronan’s room slamming became their cue to enter. Gansey recovered his poise easily and walked back into the apartment, heading straight for the desk in the middle of the room where his car keys sat. He studiously ignored Noah who still stood by the desk, rooted to his spot, staring after Ronan’s door with a bemused expression on his elfin face.

Adam hovered at the threshold of the main door, anger completely burned out, now too timid to enter after what he had just done, after what he had just witnessed. He didn’t understand anything that was going on. He waited for Gansey in silence, and when Gansey was done and walking back out to meet him, Adam dared to throw a glance in Noah’s direction and wondered what was going on between him and Ronan. He wished he hadn’t looked, because Noah was staring back at him with large glittering gray-gold eyes, and a slow knowing smile spreading across his thin mouth.

For the second time that night, Adam spun on his heels so fast he almost stumbled, and hurried down the steps to follow Gansey to his car. His ears wouldn’t go back to normal until much later that night, when he was sitting in the dark, alone at last in his tiny room in the trailer park.

* * *

 

Gansey sat alone in the Camaro for a long while after he had dropped Adam off. He was parked a short distance from the cluster of mailboxes next to the gutted driveway that led to the trailer park. He didn’t know how the holiday had ended the way it did. They were happy just two days ago, when they went to that café on open mic night. It felt like someone had tossed his friends in a powder keg and while he was away, the acid between continued to build until it blew up in his face that night the moment he returned.

It had not been a pretty picture arriving at Monmouth with Adam ready to attack Noah. Gansey couldn’t be sure what Noah had said; it wasn’t even about Adam’s bruises, maybe something about his mom?  But the moment Gansey saw the bruises on Adam’s face, the uneven hunch of his shoulders that betrayed an even deeper injury, the hitch of his breath whenever he inhaled too sharply to shout or yell, Gansey knew that something irreparable had happened, and Noah had, in fact, had nothing to do with it. Adam was already a lit fuse long before Noah’s comments about his mother.

Gansey had tried to reason with Adam, but talking to him when he was angry was like continuously trying to hit his head on a wall: Adam was ridiculously obstinate and beyond reason. He didn’t want their advice, he didn’t want their pity, and he didn’t want anyone’s help. It felt like Ronan and his one-track determination to self-destruct in the aftermath of Niall Lynch’s murder. Only this time, with the look of hunted wariness in Adam’s eyes, it was unending. Adam Parrish was stuck in a vortex of abuse perpetrated by the very people who should have been protecting him, and he wasn’t interested in anyone hurling him a lifeline.

Adam had completely exploded when Gansey suggested calling the police.

He had a number of choice words for what he thought people would turn out when things like these happened to them, and Gansey shuddered at the memory. He hadn’t quite thought Adam Parrish to be cold, but the chilling glare he had levelled on him and Noah was unforgettable. Adam wanted no assistance from anyone. He would have been perfectly happy keeping his friends in the dark and making excuses for how livid his face looked, beaten black and purple and blue. Gansey would have probably believed him if he had lied, but Noah had quietly explained the truth, and hearing the words thrown back to his face by someone who had not even been there to see him sew himself up had been the final straw for Adam.

He sighed. He didn’t know if they would continue to be friends after this evening. Adam felt like he was just going to slip away forever until everyone forgot about his black eye. And then there was Ronan, who had walked into the apartment like a storm cloud brewing, waiting for the right trigger words from Adam before he struck.

Gansey wanted to understand what his friends were going through, their anger at the world, their anger at themselves, but they had built mountains that he felt too weary to cross. He didn’t even want to think about that weird angry-kissing he had just witnessed, or the equally weird embarrassment Adam had carried for the rest of the night. He had been shaking, and awkwardly running his hand through his hair and biting his fingernails throughout the entire drive to the trailer park.

Shaking his head tiredly, looked for his phone and dialed a number, waited quietly for an answer. When the connection clicked, Blue’s quiet voice greeted him like a soft breeze rustling through his hair.

“Hey.”

Gansey let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Hey.”

“Good thing I was hanging out here when you called.” Blue sounded thoughtful. “Orla usually hogs the phone at this hour.”

“Yeah.” He tapped his finger on the steering wheel, thinking. “Do you think you could sneak out for a while?” He didn’t know why he was asking Blue to sneak out to meet him. He might get her into trouble the same way they all got Adam into trouble earlier that week. “I just… need someone to talk to.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Gansey said. He started his car, shut his eyes for a moment, opened them, and then started to drive.


	10. Back to December

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Kavinsky makes a surprise cameo.

They did not see Adam again that week. He did not show up to school at all, and although Ronan thought he occasionally glimpsed his slim form through the smudged glass walls of the convenience store downtown, neither he nor Gansey ever bothered to find out. If Adam wanted to be alone, then everyone was damn well going to leave him alone. Gansey had strictly warned both Ronan and Noah to Stay Away, with random capitalization in his text. He had also apparently talked Blue into not trying to check up, because Adam hated her the most.

It would have been all right with Ronan, if that didn’t mean that band practices suddenly meant they were out of a singer. He had thought about bringing out the music he had written and have Adam sing it for the rest of their friends so they could practice it for Band Night, but with Adam missing and potentially no longer interested in either the band or their friendship, there was no point in playing it. Practice continued with the four of them just working on getting their instrumentals together, and occasionally having Blue bring up a rap song, but everything felt half-hearted and uninteresting, and by Thursday, Ronan had disappeared from practice altogether to find his excitement elsewhere, on the open road in the BMW.

Gansey was beside himself with the complete degeneration of two of his friends, and Noah was practically no help. He drifted between sitting mournfully at his drum set and sitting outside with his skateboard, looking despondent that Ronan wasn’t interested to do stunts with him. Ronan found people to race with and didn’t come home on Thursday night, or come to school on Friday. Noah lived in the Aglionby poolside and logged as many practice hours as possible to ignore everyone else being a dick.

Blue came by Monmouth on Saturday morning to a disheveled Gansey sitting on the floor, reading a book on Welsh mythology. She demanded they play a song. Gansey put aside his book, excused himself to brush his teeth and change out of his pajamas as he had not bothered with himself at all, having been completely drained for entire week with his impossible roommates, and then they played music. It was not fantastic by far: Blue had trouble hearing herself on the mic as she let loose on Noah’s drums, and Gansey was not the best on guitars, but they made it work for a while and it was all right.

Ronan came back home that night finally, utterly smashed, slurring a tune that Gansey could not understand. Noah had just come home from a swim meet and was too tired to help Gansey get Ronan out of his car before he went out to race again or ram his car into a telephone pole on the way to hell. With much difficulty because his friend was so tall, and a lot of drunken swearing on Ronan’s part, Gansey was able to finally get him out, shove him into the apartment and leave him inside the shower to work out his own stink. Ronan sat fully clothed in the hot stream until he sobered enough to realize there was no one else inside, and he finally stripped and showered properly, and then collapsed in his room after a while, and Monmouth Manufacturing was once again silent.

 

Ronan had not had a complete relapse since Gansey had had his stomach pumped. That had been the day they had all met Adam. Arguably, it was the day that their band started, though it was not the day that Adam had joined them. He had mostly been able to coast happily without getting completely shit-faced, and they would all find out exactly why the following school day.

Adam was finally back in school. His bruises had mostly faded to sickening yellow-green splotches on his face. The stitches on his brow were gone, so was the sling. If his face had been pinched before, he was positively gaunt, with a ghostly pallor under his tan skin, now. There was a gap between the pale hairs of his left brow, where the stitches and the cut had been, and the scabs of the cut had been peeled off, so there was a raw line of pink healing skin just over his eye. Ronan found it unbelievably sexy.

Although he sat at his regular seat, he kept his head down, buried into his textbook, and hurriedly taking notes of all the things he missed in his absence. He was silent for the entire class. It was exactly the same shit at every class he shared with either or both his friends. Ronan’s fingers itched to grab him by the neck and wrangle words, noise—something!—out of him.

Gansey finally cornered Adam at his locker at lunchtime. Ronan trailed behind. He didn’t know whether he would be able to stop himself from jumping Adam and shaking him until his teeth rattled. Or something. He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do with Adam but he was pretty sure it would not be good. Or appropriate.

Gansey did not beat around the bush and looked Adam squarely in the eye. “You’ve been avoiding us.”

Adam exchanged books for a sweatshirt, although the three of them know they had Latin after lunch. Gym was at the end of the day and Adam was probably excused, on account of his injuries.

He closed his locker quietly, turned to face Gansey, and gave a sidelong glance to Ronan, who was still hanging around behind Gansey, pretending to be disinterested. “I’m okay now, Gansey.” His voice was quiet too. He moved so he could face Ronan completely. Ronan pretended to be more interested in the water cooler next to the men’s restroom door. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can make any practices until the weekend.”

Ronan grunted. So there it was. “Whatever, man.”

Adam ignored him and turned back to Gansey. “I’m okay, really. I’ve been to a doctor too. My shoulder’s okay, it’s not dislocated, just bruised muscle.”

Gansey’s eyes narrowed. “Are you—“

“Look, Gansey, I’ve got it already. It’s on my med cert,” Adam interrupted smoothly. When Gansey continued to look skeptical, he waved a thin hand dismissively. “I had to submit one to get special credit for the test I missed in Bio.”

“Oh,” said Gansey. He turned back to Ronan, who rolled his eyes. “Well, can you at least hang out? We’re thinking Nino’s tonight?”

Adam checked his cheap plastic watch, picked at an imaginary loose thread on the sweatshirt he was holding. “I’ll try. I have to work today.”

 

 

Adam, of course, did not show up at Nino’s that evening. Ronan left Gansey and Noah after two slices of Hawaiian Delight. Blue had stared after him as he tore out of the pizzeria, cursing under his breath. The pizza would be left uneaten, because Gansey preferred avocado and anchovies, and Noah despised pineapples. If Adam had been there, he would have made a face at the pineapples, but would have finished it anyway because he found Ronan’s wasteful behavior abhorrent and food, like everything else except probably air, was a scarce commodity in Adam Parrish’s life. But he wasn’t there, and Ronan wanted to ransack Henrietta until he unearthed his stupid freckly face.

He found Adam still at the garage where he worked Mondays and Wednesdays. Since becoming friends with Adam, Ronan had dropped by Boyd’s Auto Shop a number of times during Adam’s shifts. He had mostly memorized what it was Adam did for a living, especially to support his education, and had convinced himself that was part of what friends did (though he sincerely had no idea what Gansey and Noah did on their spare time, besides be a dork or skateboard in the parking lot).

On Mondays, because most people were busy with the start of the week, work was light, and Adam was usually alone, working under ageing Honda Civics, or bent over the hood of a mid-priced SUV. The soccer moms who brought in the SUVs would usually leave their cars and get their _amigas_ to pick them up to go to yoga or book readings or whatever it was that middle-aged women did in their spare time. Sometimes, they would hang around in the waiting room and sneak glances and laugh and giggle and make absurd, borderline criminal inappropriate comments about the very obviously not-legal young mechanic attending to their cars. (Ronan didn’t think he had many things in common with soccer moms of any ages, but he privately agreed with some of the inappropriate comments and had a bunch of ideas of his own, especially when Adam removed the top half of his jumpsuit and walked around in that dirty white t-shirt of his, revealing skinny, freckly arms, lightly muscled from years of working on cars. It played in his head like a blue-collar themed porno, minus the gross, noisy fucking, and now really, Ronan Lynch should not be thinking about blue-collar themed anything or things south of his belt line were going to be very uncomfortable very fast.)

There were no soccer moms in the auto shop today, and Adam wasn’t alone. There was a lone bone-white Mitsubishi Evo in one of the lots, the knife graphic on its side smudged with mud and the rear right wheel smelled of vomit and acid, bile and beer. Although the car could use a good wash, it didn’t look like it needed anything fixed. Ronan’s eyes narrowed. There was only one person he knew in Henrietta who owned such a car. Ronan got out of his car and skulked in the shadows.

Joseph Kavinsky was a transplant from the East Coast. Everyone in Aglionby knew of him because Noah went to school with him in New York, and everyone in Henrietta knew him because Kavinsky was the sort of seedy high school boy who had his hands up to the elbows in everything illegal: booze, drugs, girls, fake IDs, stolen cars… street races. Ronan had raced him before but had bored pretty quickly because Kavinsky was a loser in a gem of a car. His Evo had tons better performance than Ronan’s BMW ever could hope for, but he was such a bad driver, there was no point in racing at all.

Now he stood near the waiting room entrance, double-necked six-string hanging off by a black strap printed with fire and skulls on his left shoulder. Like Noah and everyone Ronan knew who came from the East Coast, Kavinsky was slim, small and pale. Unlike Noah, he looked like a disgusting old bastard leering up at Adam, who was busy checking off a receipt, probably from a previous client. Kavinsky wore a white tank top, leather pants, biker boots, chains hanging off his neck and belt and pretended to ooze rock star drama. Ronan didn’t know that Kavinsky also played. He wondered if wearing leather pants in hot, muggy Virginia murdered his balls. Kavinsky’s voice was mildly high-pitched, nasal and wheezy. There was nothing charismatic about his swimmingly large, sunken eyes, but when he turned the charm on, he sort of looked like a gender bent Barbie, one that was high on several different psychedelic drugs, or had maybe met a three-year-old.

“So come on, princess. When are you free again? Gig’s up at Valkyrie tomorrow night. Proko’s a pussy and OD’d his ass on me. I need a backup.” Unlike Noah, Kavinsky’s accent was unmistakable, Jersey trash, instead of the neutral New Yorker clipped tone that Noah used. Ronan knew the Valkyrie club. He was there, drunk out of his mind, on Friday night. One needed a really good fake ID to get in: the bouncer knew almost everyone in Henrietta, especially the Aglionby minors who liked to sneak in with a $50 under-the-coat-sleeve bribe.

Adam pocketed the receipt for filing, ran a shaky hand through his hair. His face was smeared with grease, hair awkwardly sticking out. He unzipped his coveralls to tie around his waist, in preparation for the end of the shift. “It was a one-time gig. I’m not playing that place again.”

Ronan almost choked. He had hazy memories of drinking at the Valkyrie. It was an over-priced gig frequented by coked-up young executives and Kavinsky’s Aglionby rich boy trash type. Ronan liked the beer selection over the music, but they’d done a pretty good set last Friday. His mind doubled back to the night’s performers. It had been industrial rock, instead of the usual trance. So Adam had played that set with Kavinsky’s band. No wonder he couldn’t get the last song off his mind. Gansey had asked about it when he had sobered enough. Ronan couldn’t remember the song title.

“It pays good shit, Parrish.” Kavinsky said, still leering, as he shifted abruptly to move his guitar. Adam flinched and tugged down the sleeves of his coveralls tied around his waist. His eyes were haunted. Ronan had seen that look before, whenever anyone around Adam moved too fast or there was a flurry of hands out the corner of his eye.

“It paid in drugs, I’m looking for money. No thanks.”

Kavinsky laughed. “That’s why I said it pays good shit. Come on, we’ll paint your face next time so Carruthers doesn’t recognize you. Kept harping about his hard-on for your goddamn freckles in Chemistry. I thought faculty might hear and we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

Adam blanched. “I’m not playing for free, K. You want drugs so badly, you sing for your band. I’m not standing in any of your gigs anymore.”

“You’re such a drama queen,” Kavinsky groused, but Adam had already turned away, conversation clearly over on his part. He busied himself with cleaning up his tools.

“Go bother someone else.”

Kavinsky shoved a pair of large, white-rimmed sunglasses up his nose, exuding cool, swung his guitar up his back. “Your loss, trailer trash. You’re not gonna find another band like the Dream Pack in this shitty town. And don’t get started on that cocksucker, Lynch. What a bunch of amateur posers.”

Adam did not deign to reply and continued to clean up, moving to the back to wash the grease of his hands, arms and face. Kavinsky eventually stalked back to his car and drove off. Shaking with anger, Ronan followed suit, moving quietly back into the shadows where he had parked the BMW. He remembered the song Adam had played now, had been singing it when he’d crashed into Monmouth finally. He knew Kavinsky played at Valkyrie—it was the kind of bored rich kid thing he did, besides dealing drugs and forging IDs. Ronan had heard somewhere before that K’s dad owned the place. He didn’t know that Adam would bother with it. Straight A Parrish didn’t belong in seedy clubs.

“I know you’re there.”

Ronan almost jumped. He turned quickly and saw Adam standing near the entrance of the waiting room. The harsh white light from the door illuminating his thin frame like a stained glass Jesus. Adam wiped his hands on the front of his coveralls. His fingers were still shaking. Ronan didn’t know if it was from the cold or something else.

Adam sighed when Ronan didn’t say anything. “I needed the money and couldn’t work at the factory, with my shoulder.”

“Okay,” was all he said. He didn’t want to hear excuses. “Are you going to play for that little shit again?”

Adam gave him a pointed look, crossed his arms before his chest and sneered at Ronan. “What’s it matter to you?”

Ronan narrowed his eyes. He didn’t know what exactly Adam wanted from him, standing there, light streaming behind his back, and looking like a saint. Saints didn’t play venues like Valkyrie, where half the patrons were stoned and the other half shit-faced at the bar. Saints didn’t wear dirty coveralls, grease-streaked t-shirts, and didn’t have cuts over their left eyebrows.

“You ditched us for that asshole, Parrish.” He smiled thinly. “Twice now, at least.”

Adam dropped his hands, suddenly looking very tired. “I didn’t ditch you, Lynch. I thought maybe you and Czerny might be too busy sucking face to make music.” He stopped, face suddenly flushed and turned away to look at the floor, as if he hadn’t meant to say that at all. Even in the gloom, Ronan could see the pink in the tips of his ears. So Adam had seen that too. Ronan wasn’t sure what to do with that knowledge.

“And anyway,” he added quietly, “I thought you might not want to see me at all after everything I said.”

Ronan only rolled his eyes and turned away, started to climb into his car. He stopped halfway when Adam didn’t move, continued to look at the floor. “I always want to see you, Parrish.” He smiled. It was only nine thirty. Maybe Gansey and Noah weren’t done at Nino’s yet. “Get in. I’m fucking hungry.”

Adam Parrish did not protest and got into his car.

_Miles Away_   
_There's hopeless smiles brighter than mine_   
_And I need for you to come and go  
Without the truth falling out._

_Old incisions refusing to stay  
Like sun through the trees on a cloudy day _

_You brighten my life like a polystyrene hat_   
_But it melts in the sun like a life without love_   
_But I've waited for you so I'll keep holding out  
Without You_

_Feels like the wind blows_   
_Holding you with us_   
_She takes no other_   
_False light and ashes_   
_Blooming like winter_   
_Dry eyes and cracked lips_   
_Under the stone wall  
Withdrawn and wishless_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song in this chapter is Without You, by Silverchair.


	11. I Know Places

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Adam doesn't quite know when to quit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fanfic is already completed and I am going to be posting one chapter a day until it's fully posted.
> 
> I'm also working on another AU, shorter hopefully, than this one, because long fanfics, while really entertaining to read, are very tiring to write. :)

“I’ll tell you something about him,” Noah Czerny said, his gaze faraway as he absently bit into his sandwich. His voice was low and thoughtful as he chewed quietly.

Ronan crumpled his own sandwich wrapper, having finished eating before Noah, Gansey and Adam managed to unwrap their own food. The four of them sat on a bench in the quad watching a group of freshmen carry on a spirited game of Frisbee in the middle of lunch hour. None of them, except perhaps Gansey, could stand the cafeteria crowd, so they sat outside in the overcast afternoon. Although it was early December, the weather was mild and felt more like a cool fall afternoon than the beginnings of winter. Only Adam, who seemed perpetually miserable with the cold, as evidenced by the occasional sniffle and the pink tinge of the tip of his nose, wore a jacket over the several layers of clothing their uniform required. Ronan had a hard time not staring whenever he put his sandwich down between bites to rub his hands together or miserably tug at the sleeves of his jacket.

“Jesus, Adam, I think you maybe should’ve called in sick today,” Gansey said just as Adam sneezed, and then fished for a handkerchief from his jacket pocket.

Ronan tossed him a clean paper napkin, which Adam caught and gratefully patted at his chin and mouth bashfully. Ronan couldn’t stop staring. There was mercifully no snot or booger anywhere.

“Sorry,” Adam muttered, folding the napkin, and then folding over the sandwich wrapper over his food. It looked like he was done eating after just three bites. Ronan passed him one of the fancy bottled coffee that Gansey liked to buy to pretend he drank coffee like the rest of the human race. Adam gave it a side-eye and shook his head. The whole thing looked entirely made of milk with maybe a few drops of coffee, and Adam Parrish only drank his coffee black. “I can’t miss any more classes.”

It felt like an uneasy truce. It had been a few days since Ronan had seen Adam talking with Kavinsky at the auto shop. Adam had stopped avoiding them immediately after that, gravitating easily back in Gansey’s orbit once he felt sufficiently forgiven. Gansey and Noah had not mentioned anything at all and happily settled back into their friendship. Ronan did not mention seeing Adam or Kavinsky or that Adam ever played with Kavinsky’s band, and Adam appeared to be quietly grateful for this little fact. He had not yet met with Blue, and secretly, Ronan hoped they wouldn’t get back into whatever it was they had before. He was quite selfishly happy hogging all the quiet attention and gratitude that Adam was giving him for his not mentioned Kavinsky.

Gansey shook his head at Adam incredulously, and turned back to Noah. “Who’re we talking about?”

Noah pursed his thin lips and nodded in the direction of the cafeteria. Four boys from the junior class emerged, talking loudly, cussing at the freshmen when the Frisbee strayed into their general direction. Ronan knew all of them, having raced them and their souped up cars at one point or another during the summer. This was the Dream Pack, Kavinsky’s band: Jiang on drums, Skov on bass, Swan on rhythm, Kavinsky on lead. Prokopenko, their vocalist was missing in action, probably still in the hospital, if Kavinsky’s comment to Adam were to be believed.

“Language, Mr. Kavinsky,” a random teacher admonished as she passed them by.

Joseph Kavinsky leered at the teacher when her back was finally turned. He turned and fished around his belt loop, unhooked a trashy black and gold snapback and pulled it back over his head in flagrant disobedience of the dress code. He split from the others and headed straight for Ronan’s group with a glint in his sunken eyes and a smug smile on ridiculous pink lips. Beside Gansey, Adam sniffled into a handkerchief quietly, avoiding Kavinsky’s gaze.

“Him,” Noah said softly, calmly reaching for the coffee-milk Adam had just rejected, twisted off the cap and took a sip, grinning widely at the sugar content, before taking a bigger swig. “Gansey, are you even sure this thing is coffee?”

Before Gansey could answer, Kavinsky stopped in front of them, smirking as he stood directly in front of Adam, putting one hand on his waist and cocking a hip towards Adam’s face. Ronan stood, hands coiled into a fist, ready to fight, Gansey quick to put a hand on Ronan’s arm. Adam continued to sit, covering his nose and looking at his lap. Noah blithely continued to eat his sandwich.

“Hey, Pretty Boy.” Kavinsky’s lazy smile widened as he took in Ronan’s fighter stance, though he didn’t bother to acknowledge him at all, his attention still on Adam. “Thought I told you to pick up your princess skirts and stay away from these losers. Gay’s catching with these bitches.”

Adam kept silent, face half-hidden by the snot-filled handkerchief. His eyes fluttered to Ronan, then looked back down, completely avoiding Kavinsky. Ronan edge closer, his fist clenching, itching to punch the smirk off Kavinsky’s face. Even if Kavinsky had not been looking at Adam in any sort of offensive way, Ronan would probably have punched him at least once just to see if that hooked nose of his broke easily. Him grinning lecherously at a completely oblivious Adam made Ronan’s blood boil.

Surprisingly, it was not Gansey who spoke to defuse the situation.

“Hey K,” Noah greeted casually. He’d finished his sandwich and stood now, hand in his pocket. Noah had never been assertive or threatening in any manner that Ronan could remember since he’d met him. Noah had always been the small, frail kid who relied on Gansey’s charm and Ronan’s brawn avoid getting shoved up lockers in school, but the way that he looked at Kavinsky was poisonous.

Kavinsky wasn’t threatened at all, though he did turn from Adam to Noah. The two of them appeared almost comically even matched: two skinny pale-skinned boys with sunken eyes, fragile features rearranged into masks of hate smothered under layers of complication as they sized each other up. Kavinsky still had one hand on his waist, brown tufts of hair escaping from his ridiculous snapback. The two of them looked like garden gnomes threatening each other over their patch in the sun.

“Hey Czerny,” K greeted with a flash of cigarette-stained teeth. “You fuck any old ladies recently? Or Dick 3 and cocksucking Lynch here starting to rub off on you?”

If Gansey hadn’t been still been holding on to Ronan’s arm, he would have beaten Kavinsky to a pulp by now. Kavinsky didn’t look at him, just continued to smile lazily at Noah, his eyes occasionally darting back to Adam, who continued to sit miserably, ignoring everyone. Noah ran a cool hand through his hair and sat back down next to Adam, glancing up at K curiously.

“I don’t know, man. Life is tough enough without an STD to worry about,” he replied coolly, one fair eyebrow arched pointedly at Kavinsky. “How’s that going, by the way? I heard Valtrex doesn’t mix well with coke.”

Hazel eyes narrowed. And then Kavinsky laughed, a short amused sound, utterly incongruous with the dead look in his eyes. “Remind me never to take seconds from you.” He turned to Adam, grin widening as he pinched at Adam’s bony face. “Don’t take my word for it, but you still get herpes from sucking cock, Parrish. Stay away from Lynch.”

He sauntered off before Ronan could break his nose. Ronan popped a bone in his shoulder, glaring darkly at Gansey. “Should’ve let me kick that dickhead’s ass.”

Gansey rolled his eyes. “And what? You get suspended? Not happening, Ronan. We all know what Kavinsky’s like.” He turned to Adam, who let out another pitiful sneeze into the depths of the handkerchief. “I don’t know why he’s taken an interest in you, Parrish, but stay away from Kavinsky. That kid is just bad news.”

“Trainwreck,” Noah muttered, losing interest in the conversation. He picked up his books. “K thinks it’s cool to fuck other people’s girlfriends.” He stood and thought for a moment, as if meaning to say more as he regarded Adam, then he blinked and it was gone. Ronan wondered privately what was going on. The mischievous spark was back in Noah’s eyes as he bounced on the balls of his feet. “Well, see you guys later at practice!”

Adam groaned and wiped his nose, and looked mournfully at his handkerchief. “You guys go ahead. I think I have a nosebleed.”

   
 

Because he was so miserable from his cold, everyone easily forgave Adam for not being able to sing in the practice session that afternoon. Although he had told Ronan that he would not be able to make any sessions until the weekend, Adam felt guilty enough for missing so many practice sessions over his inflated sense of pride and shame that he actually cycled to Monmouth if only just to show his face. Why _couldn’t_ Adam Parrish just get over the fact that he needed help, that he didn’t want to keep getting beaten up whenever he showed up at home and so much as breathed wrongly in his dad’s direction? It was a question he had asked himself from the very first time fists had connected with his face. That was a lifetime ago. Adam Parrish still did not understand himself now.

 _What exactly do you want, Adam?_ He didn’t know either.

Gansey was not in the apartment yet when he arrived, and Adam pulled self-consciously at the sleeves of his jacket at the sight of Ronan and Noah’s cars parked. He didn’t know if he wanted to see them together. Something had changed that night, when he saw them kissing in the apartment, completely oblivious to his and Gansey presence. He didn’t know if he had changed or if there had always been something between his two friends. It shouldn’t have been his business. It wasn’t like he had any sort of history with either of them, not like with Blue. If he’d seen Blue kissing anyone, Adam wasn’t sure he’d be able to screw his head back on straight.

But the sight of Ronan and Noah kissing that night had knocked some screw loose in the roiling black madness that was Adam Parrish’s mind. At the time, it felt like getting punched in the ears. Once when he was thirteen, his dad had been so pissed off with him for being unable to fix the old pickup that he had thrown a bunch of the plastic crockery in the kitchen at Adam. One of the plastic bowls whizzed directly at the side of his head and knocked his ear. Because the bowl was plastic, it hadn’t hurt as much as he thought it would, but his ear was hot and red for an entire week. Seeing that kiss had been nothing like that. It had felt a hundred times worse, like he had been hit with a book, or maybe an anvil, on both sides of the head.

He wasn’t entirely sure how to put himself back together again.

So he stood outside to wait for Gansey. Monmouth Manufacturing had large almost floor length windows that went from the first floor where the living room, kitchen-bathroom-laundry room, and Gansey’s bed were, all the way up to the second floor, where Ronan and Noah’s rooms were. Adam wheeled his bicycle to one of the windows, and leaned in, trying to see if there was anything he could make out through the frosted glass of the windows.

He started when he felt a cold hand on his shoulder, and whirled unsteadily on his feet, ears hot from being caught spying on his friends. Noah stood behind him, smiling mildly.

“You can come in any time if you want, you know,” he said softly, looking up at Adam with maddening gray-gold eyes. Adam swore Noah could see right through his soul. He didn’t know what the other boy would find there. Even Adam didn’t know what each of the shattered pieces contained, whether they could be glued back together, whether any of them even fit with each other.

He tugged at his jacket to keep his fingers from shaking. “I—I didn’t know if anyone was home.”

Noah shrugged, still smiling. He looked almost impish if it weren’t for the silver fleur-de-lis stud on his nose. “Even if no one was here, you can still come in.”

Adam licked his lips. “I’d, uh, rather not.” He fisted his hands and shoved them forcefully in his pants pockets. Noah’s smile felt too knowing. He suddenly felt exposed, and he didn’t want to see Noah smiling at him like that, like he knew exactly why Adam was peering through windows instead of knocking on doors to talk to his friends like a normal person. “You and Ronan… I mean, you might be busy.”

Noah’s brow furrowed skeptically, and then he was smiling again, that knowing smile that freaked Adam out. He sorely wished Gansey or even Blue would finally get there so he didn’t have to talk to Noah, or to Noah and Ronan together alone.

“Oh, well. Ronan’s probably asleep or tuning his guitar. I just stopped outside for chips!” He held up a bag of snacks cheerfully. “You don’t have to leave early today or anything, right? I think we’re going to pick our set list for Band Night, and Ronan said he wrote a new song.” He grinned and started for the main door, motioning for Adam to follow him. Adam remained rooted to his spot. “Well come on, Ronan’s waiting!”

Adam ran a nervous hand through his hair. Part of him itched to join Noah, longed for the remembered sense of togetherness the five of them had before everything went to shit in his life. Another part of him wanted nothing to do with Noah, and fearfully wanted to hold back in case Noah and Ronan somehow decided sucking face with an audience was hot.

“I don’t—“

He was mercifully saved by the roar of the Camaro pulling into the parking lot. Adam let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, as Gansey and Blue emerged from the car. Blue was overjoyed at the sight of him and ran over to hug him, cutting off whatever he had been about to say to Noah, and sparing Noah from having to reply to the awkward look on his face.

“I can’t believe you’d just disappear like that, you jerk!” There was no bite to her voice as she laughed, hugging his arm and half-dragged him into apartment, chattering animatedly of the songs they had practiced in his absence. Adam nodded and smiled and sniffled into the sleeve of his jacket and awkwardly allowed himself to be led. He tried to put away his discomfort at the bemused expression on Noah and Gansey’s faces, and at the glittering narrowed blue eyes with which Ronan had greeted him when they finally entered the apartment. He could take that apart later. For now, there was the music.

Before Adam left for his factory shift that evening, Gansey gathered the five of them to discuss their plans for Band Night. It was apparent to Adam that nothing truly productive had happened in his absence. Blue talked about practicing their instrumentals, but Ronan hadn’t been interested in playing full songs without Adam doing vocals. He was almost flattered by the attention if Ronan had not shot him and Blue another strange glare that he couldn’t begin to understand.

He shook his head and forced himself to listen to Gansey, who was taking notes of everything they were planning.

“I was thinking, since Adam’s sick now and can’t really sing, we may only have enough time to completely practice 2 songs, especially if some of us are going to be away for Christmas.” Gansey nodded at Noah, who flashed two thumbs up. Ronan, Adam and Blue looked at each other. So it was going to be just the three of them again during the holiday break. Adam hoped it would be nothing like the previous holiday break when he’d mostly tried to kill their friendship. Gansey continued, “We have maybe 3 weeks to practice whatever songs we’re going to play.”

Ronan knocked his knuckles on his guitar thoughtfully. “I think we should play the new song.”

Adam’s brow furrowed. New song? Did Ronan mean the one he wrote before Thanksgiving? The one Adam had quietly slipped the lyrics and chords to before his outburst? Blue and Gansey exchanged glances and nodded in agreement, both looking at Adam, then back to Ronan. This confused Adam even more because they hadn’t talked at all about that song, and he didn’t know if he was comfortable singing words he’d written, but Noah put his apprehension to rest.

“Yeah, I think it’s going to be appropriate. It’s hopeful and doesn’t sound too sad. I don’t think I could handle playing something depressing for our first gig.”

Not his song then, Adam decided. “Which one is this?”

Blue smiled. “Oh Ronan wrote a new song last week. Totally appropriate, like Noah said.” Everyone was nodding. Ronan only looked at Adam with the same glittering blue eyes. Maybe he was missing something.

“I’ll teach it to you when you’re not spreading disease all over the place, Parrish,” Ronan finally said.

Gansey smiled and put that down. “So, that’s ‘You’ll be Safe Here’. Maybe we should put that as our last song? We should do a fast-paced cover to introduce ourselves.”

Adam turned over the song title in his head, only half-listening to the discussion. What did that mean, he wondered? All the strange, meaningful glances that everyone gave him suddenly felt so loaded. He wondered if this had anything to do with what had happened to him. He wondered if this was Ronan’s way of showing pity. Adam didn’t want to sing that song if it was about pity for him.

“We could do ‘Baby One More Time’ and have Ronan sing that,” Noah guffawed at his own suggestion, dodging a kick to the shin from Ronan. “Oh my God, maybe Adam can do the dance number in a schoolgirl skirt.” Adam promptly kicked Noah as well, but his leg caught against Ronan’s foot, which had just then shot out at Noah’s shin. Noah dodged them both, grinning smugly, and then, this weird knowing smile again when he saw Adam’s foot catch, and Adam pulled his leg back hurriedly, and concentrated on what Gansey was saying.

A few more song ideas were thrown in, each more ridiculous than the last, until Blue was suggesting they do Smooth Criminal, complete with the crotch-grabbing routine to be done by Adam, Gansey nearly choking at the suggestion, and Noah chortling about the moonwalking and hat dance routine. Ronan stared wonderingly at Adam as if he was actually imagining it and grinning like an idiot when Noah suggested he could teach Adam exactly how to grab his crotch without murdering his balls.

“Wait, wait, I know!” Ronan held his hand up finally to indicate that this was a serious suggestion that they should consider. “We should do Wildest Dreams.”

“Uh,” Blue said, startled with the idea. “Why? I mean, Taylor Swift? Really? Didn’t quite think of you as a fan.”

Adam felt his cheeks warm, remembering Ronan telling him on the day they met that he and Noah had heard him singing in the gym showers. He was almost sure this had been the song. The look Ronan gave him confirmed it. He’d forgotten that, it was just something he sang along to on the radio. Why was it so important that Ronan would actually remember? It didn’t look like the song had any recall on Noah, and Adam distinctly remember Ronan saying he had been with Noah in the gym showers that day. Come to think of it, Adam was sure the showers and locker room had been empty before he even stripped. He wouldn’t have showered if there were people there, so afraid was he for any of the other boys at school to find out about his abuse.

“It’s a little slow,” Gansey said thoughtfully. Blue nodded. “I mean it’s nice enough, and I’m sure Adam can pull off the falsetto, but… why?”

“Because,” Ronan said slowly. Adam realized Ronan was looking at him, had been looking at him for quite some time. He didn’t elaborate further. Ronan continued to stare.

So he looked back. “I can do Wildest Dreams.”

Gansey, Blue and Noah were looking back and forth between the two of them. Finally Gansey nodded. “Okay, then we’ll do Wildest Dreams.”

“Ugh,” Noah said, slapping his hand to his forehead dramatically. “And I was looking forward to the moonwalk and crotch-grabbing.”

And just like that, the moment was gone. Ronan was no longer staring at him. Adam felt dizzy, his chest collapsing at the slow exhale of breath. It felt like a test, and he wondered if he had been found wanting. Shaking his head again, he stood up, gathered the jacket he had hung on the back of Gansey’s couch.

“I gotta get going. Work.”

Blue stood as well. It appeared she had a shift at Nino’s that evening. “Me too. You biking?”

Adam sniffled and made a face to let her know exactly how he felt about that. It would be at least an hour in the biting December cold air. Gansey grinned at them both.

“I’ll drive—“

“No, I’ll take Parrish, you can drive Sargent,” Ronan interrupted, standing up abruptly and dropping his guitar. Gansey looked at him strangely, but nodded anyway. Adam supposed that would work better: Nino’s was downtown. The factory where he worked was outside of town. It was two different directions and really quite far from each other.

Noah was bouncing excitedly after Blue and Gansey. “I’m coming with! I want pizza for dinner!”

How strange, Adam thought, but didn’t comment as he allowed them to step out first, before following Ronan out the door. Ronan walked briskly to the BMW, twirling his car keys in his forefinger as he regarded Adam impatiently.

“Well, come on, Parrish, we don’t exactly have all night.”

Adam only laughed and shook his head, shivering as the cold night air hit him before he could zip his jacket up all the way to his neck. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

It was nice to have friends like his sometimes.

 

 

It was eleven by the time Adam stepped out of the factory. Although going in, he had been quite absurdly happy with the outcome of their practice session even though there had been no singing due to his cold, the long hours of manual labor had quickly caught up. His muscles hurt, his eyes watered from the dust inside the factory, and his nose was runny and gross. He should have brought another handkerchief to deal with the cold. The one he had been using earlier was ruined from the nosebleed and there was no way he was wiping his face with that thing.

Outside, the garish orange lamps from the factory parking lot offered no comfort from the cold. Adam tugged at the sleeves of his jacket as he headed for his bicycle. Ronan had chained his bike up a telephone pole at the far edge of the lot, probably to piss him off because Adam had, of course, completely forgotten about getting his bike out of Ronan’s car in his rush to get to work. There weren’t a lot of vehicles parked, just a few up front, near the main factory doors, cars that belonged to the foreman and a few of the older workers who could afford it, or who lived too far for cycling or taking the bus.

The parking lot ended next to the barbed wire fence of a scrap yard. Adam knew of this. It was where old vehicles went to die after they were gutted for parts. He had driven to the scrap yard before in Boyd’s tow truck, to deliver the remains of rusted Buicks and wrecked Toyotas. That was usually in the late afternoon. The scrap yard was operated by a pair of middle-aged immigrants. He couldn’t place their accents any time he had had the opportunity to talk them, but he guessed they were European. The employed mostly illegals who couldn’t speak a shred of English. Occasionally, when times got hard and someone from the factory was let go, he would see these people walking among the piles of rusted cars or operating the machinery. During the day time, the scrap yard was a place of noise: the sound of metal on metal, cars crushed and then dumped, one on top of each other, filling the air like an awful paean to minimum wage. At night, it was mostly silent. Only the sound of the lamps buzzing with static could usually be heard.

But tonight, he heard something else. At first he thought he was imagining things, maybe the cold medication he had taken mid-shift was doing things to his head, but he’d been sure that it was no-drowse. And anyway, the twin cups of cheap black vending machine coffee had sufficiently woken him up enough that he didn’t think he was hallucinating, but there it was, beckoning like an illicit lover raring for a midnight tryst.

He didn’t know how he had known but he recognized the steady whine of Kavinsky’s double-headed axe. He wasn’t sure how it was he managed to be standing before his bike in front of a telephone pole one minute, and standing in the middle of the scrap yard the next, gaping at the ridiculous setup of monstrous amps around the piles and piles of destroyed vehicles. Kavinsky’s gang had rigged up the place like a stage, turning the one of the gigantic halogen lamps towards the center of the yard where they had their setup. He frowned when he noticed money passed between Skov and Jiang, the latter gleefully pocketing the Benjamin as he cocked an eyebrow at Adam.

“Knew you couldn’t resist, Parrish,” Kavinsky greeted, speaking into the microphone. His nasal voice echoed all around the yard, grating on Adam’s ears.

Adam shot him a dirty look. Somehow, he had even been wheeling his bicycle into the yard. Imagine that, he had no idea how he had even walked here. “What’re you doing here, K? This is illegal.”

Kavinsky snorted. He wore the same absurd giant white-rimmed shades that swallowed up half of his ridiculously child-like face. The gold in his snapback and the chain on his neck caught the light and dazzled Adam, that he had to flinch and look away. “Ain’t no one gonna bring this party down, man. I own this joint.”

Somehow, the idea of a trashy over-privileged private school brat like Kavinsky owning a scrap yard didn’t surprise Adam in the least. Maybe he was related to the immigrants who owned the place. Maybe he really was here illegally, and was trespassing. The amps looked like an awful lot of work to bring in to a godforsaken place like a scrap yard though. It felt strangely fitting.

“What do you want from me?” Adam wheezed. The air was still crisp, but it felt like it had frozen the snot on his nose, and the skin around his septum felt uncomfortably tight. He felt like he was going to be sick.

Kavinsky grinned at him, hands spread out. “Hey man, I prepared this party for you. Least you can do is give me one song.”

“I’m sick, and I’m not singing for your band.”

The other three boys sniggered among each other. Clearly, this was what they were expecting. And even then, they still stuck around for the show. Adam felt his patience wearing thin. He was cold, hungry, tired and uncomfortable, and he still had a long way to get home. He tugged at his jacket sleeves. In spite of it all, or maybe because of it, his fingers itched to grab the guitar that hung by its strap on the mic stand.

“One song, twatwaffle,” K insisted.

Adam didn’t think it was a huge betrayal. It was just one song. He thought about Gansey’s warning to stay away, the strange knowing look in Noah’s face when he had talked about Kavinsky stealing his girlfriend, about the complicated look on Ronan’s face when he had shown up at the auto repair shop and confronted Adam about playing for Kavinsky.

 _What do you want, Adam?_ Ronan’s face had said.

It was just one song.

_Like you were in a porcelain dream_  
_Hit the light out and pull me back inside_  
_Cleaner parts for the delicate queen_  
_She's been broken by me too many times_

_So kneel, never bored beside her throne_  
_Polluted water that's keeping me warm_  
_So feel as I twist her out of shape  
I've had these wings kept in me too long_

_Sink deeper as I clean her  
No mirror can catch our reflection no more _

_Cover up all the scars that seem to be singing to me softly  
Come around watch her crawling into me as she slowly comes undone _

_Feel her tongue as it presses deep into me_  
_And then licks my heart clean_  
_Took a long time to fix her and now that she's whole  
I'm gonna break her again_

_We feel so safe 'cause there's nothing that's confusing_  
_So lead the way, come and teach me, all around us..._  
_Skin peels, then it heals_  
_How I need it to bleed when she digs in her teeth_

_But don't fear, it's not real  
And this warmth is all I ever want to feel _

_She's the one that's taking control, control_  
_Of the world I own and_  
_She's the one that makes me belong, belong_  
_When she comes, she comes for me  
Into me, in my dreams_

_And I just can't let it go_  
_And I come alive_  
_When my mind dissolves all I've ever known_  
_And I Drip, I Drip, I Drip it onto you  
Again and again_

He sang off-key.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to clarify that the most awesome scene in this entire fanfic is the idea of Noah doing all of these Michael Jackson impressions. So awesome.
> 
> The song Adam sings here (which he supposedly wrote for K's band) is [Drip](http://www.last.fm/music/FAKE%3F/_/DRIP) by FAKE?. This is ridiculously hard to find on the internet for whatever reason, but it's a gorgeous, extremely sexual song.


	12. Safe and Sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Ronan visits his mom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter covers Adam having a pretty severe breakdown. Please be warned.

They eventually managed to get through three songs before the start of winter break, choosing a ridiculous No Doubt song that was made even more ridiculous by Adam singing Ex-Girlfriend at the top of his lungs every time the practiced, and Blue and Gansey exchanging manic grins when Adam tried to rap the line _It's going to kill me to see you with the next girl / 'Cause I'm the most gorgeously jealous kind of ex-girl_ at Ronan’s overly serious face whenever he would make them play a do-over because goddammit Parrish, it’s not a rap!, Noah launching into a drum solo before Blue ended with a ridiculous _But I should have thought of that before we kissed_ into her back-up mic, complete with a fourth wall look into their imaginary audience. It was meant to be a counterpoint to Wildest Dreams, which they all agreed Adam worked masterfully with husky vocals and smooth falsettos, and everyone treated practice like a B-rated music video.

Ronan taught the band their parts for You’ll Be Safe Here, smugly pleased when he finally heard the song coming together, the way Blue swayed quietly as she played, Gansey’s synth introduction of the song, Noah’s measured beats, the wonder in Adam’s voice as he sang. Sometimes, when Adam would hum the tune of the song to himself while he practiced the rhythm chords, Ronan wondered if Adam realized this was his answer to the song Adam had left for them on Thanksgiving. He still hadn’t shared the lyrics that Adam wrote to the rest of the band. Adam hadn’t mentioned it, probably thought that the note had gotten lost in the riot that was Thanksgiving weekend. Ronan was glad. He wasn’t ready to part with the privacy of the words, until he had fully understood what they meant to Adam.

On the last day of classes, he received an unexpected message from Declan, one unlike all others before that usually drove him to tearing out the night in his car to race or looking for fights in the corners of dark alleys in the seedier parts of town.

Gansey and Noah were still packing for their respective trips home. Since Noah still had his sister’s car, he would be forced to drive the nine hours up to Long Island, instead of take a plane, and he planned to get ahead on that just after dinner. It was supposed to be practice day, but because of the impending trip, Ronan had called off practice, though Blue and Adam had shown up anyway, Blue in the pretext of helping Noah out on sorting through the random crap he had accumulated for Hanukkah gifts to his sisters, and Adam to practice strumming on Ronan’s infinitely nicer guitar.

She held up a strange plastic Hello Kitty figurine that had a line running across its forehead, like it had just gone through a lobotomy. It looked vaguely macabre and something exactly like what Noah would actually waste his money on. “What, even, is this thing?”

Noah gave a delighted squeal as he snatched the gift item from Blue and punched at Hello Kitty’s yellow button nose. The top of the figurine’s head swung open and revealed a rotating metal tube and a small switch. Noah flicked it and the tinkling sound of the music box filled the room, over the sound of Adam’s guitar strums. He stopped playing and looked up, bemused.

“It’s the song,” he said softly, standing up to crowd around Noah who was holding up the music box to listen more intently. “Ronan’s first song.”

Noah smiled absently. “Yeah, remember that one? You never did write any lyrics for that,” he said, looking reproachfully at Ronan, who took the guitar Adam had left behind, fingers automatically finding the chords that would match the music box tune.

Ronan blinked, his eyes found Adam’s, who was still listening to the music box. “Yeah,” he answered quietly. “Yeah, I haven’t.” Adam’s face betrayed no recognition or any indication that he remembered the lyrics he had slipped through the Monmouth main door.

Noah smiled as he shut off the figurine’s head, cutting the tinkling music. “I had it made for Adele; she loves these things. Hello Kitty and shit.” He grinned impishly before shoving the figurine back into the box that Blue held, and pushing it into his suitcase. “I liked the tune.”

He didn’t say anything more at the nostalgic tone of Noah’s voice. Blue and Noah continued to sort through Noah’s things, and Gansey tossed more polo shirts into his overnight bag. Adam borrowed Ronan’s phone so he could review the lyrics of their songs, mouthing the words in a quiet hum under his breath. He was sprawled on his stomach, on the other end of the couch, skinny legs bent to allow space for Ronan, who sat on the arm of couch on the other end, guitar balanced on one leg. The look of concentration on Adam’s face was almost irresistible, as his brows furrowed, one hand twitching as if to form chords on an air guitar. Ronan looked pointedly back down at his guitar.

“So, you guys will be practicing without us?” Gansey asked as he finally zipped up his bag. It was bursting at the seams. Ronan shrugged, Blue and Adam nodded.

“We’ve only got two weeks after Christmas and we could do a bare bones sound,” Blue answered as she folded a ridiculous pair of Hello Kitty pajamas and tossed it into Noah’s suitcase. “Anyway, Ronan’ll be here, right?”

Before he could answer, Adam knocked a knuckle on his knee and held up the phone to his face. “You’ve got a text.”

Frowning, he put down his guitar and took the phone. If this was going to be another guilt trip from Declan, he was going to drop his phone from the window in his room and party when it breaks. It wasn’t.

The quizzical look on Gansey’s face told him he had been quiet too long. He shut off the phone and tossed it back to Adam, who rolled onto his back and started fiddling with it again.

“Mom’s talking,” he said finally, quietly, wonderingly.

Gansey’s eyes widened. “Oh my God. That’s… that’s awesome!”

Noah had also stopped what he was doing and crossed the room and threw his arms around Ronan who stiffened, eyes darting to Adam. Adam’s eyes were still glued to the phone, though his pale brows quirked curiously. “Fucking finally! I’m so happy for you! You and Declan and Matthew have been waiting for her to get better for so long!”

“We’re going home for Christmas,” Ronan said looking away from Adam, who had sat up.

“Oh,” said Blue. “Then, I guess no practice for the holiday? That’s fine, I think we’re going to be busy making pie at home.”

Ronan and Gansey exchanged glances. So everyone had holiday plans now, with Blue spending time with her family, and Ronan having to spend the holiday with his brothers and his mother as they ease her back into life outside of assisted living, Gansey and Noah going home to their respective home states. Everyone had plans except Adam.

He seemed to realize this as well as the four of them turned to him, and he shrugged, shutting off Ronan’s phone to return to him. “I’ll be working. We don’t actually celebrate Christmas.”

Another set of exchanged glances between Gansey and Ronan, Noah and Blue. Ronan doubted Adam’s family every celebrated anything except maybe whenever he got paid, and then Adam’s dad probably celebrated with alcohol. Adam himself didn’t look like he cared for any holidays at all. Gansey caught Ronan’s eye and shook his head minutely. Ronan nodded. Adam would be alone, working himself raw, probably biking around Henrietta and feeling miserable in the cold, or worse, coming home to the trailer park and getting beaten up by his dad. It wasn’t something they could talk about though, because Adam was already getting up and reaching for his shoes.

“I gotta go,” he said, shrugging into his jacket and grabbing the pair of worn gloves from its pocket to slip on his fingers. The weather was still mild for winter, but Adam always seemed to be cold. “I signed up for an early shift at the convenience store tomorrow morning.” He quirked a smile at Gansey, Ronan and Noah. “So, if I don’t see you guys over the holidays, then Merry Christmas, I guess. Blue, you coming or waiting up ‘til Noah’s leaving?”

Blue shook her head no. “Noah’s dropping me off before he leaves tonight, but I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe?” Adam nodded absently.

Gansey was obviously trying to keep a frown from reaching his face as he forced a smile. “Merry Christmas, Adam. And you too, Blue. I’ll be driving out early tomorrow, so I might not be able to see you until I’m back.”

Noah dropped his things and caught up to Adam to hug him. Adam stiffened visibly almost recoiling at the suddenness of the gesture and completely unsure of how to react. “Happy holidays, Adam! I’ll be sure to bring something back for everyone. We’re going to Manhattan for the New Year Countdown!”

Ronan only nodded his goodbye. He wasn’t sure what to make of the weird look on Adam’s face when Noah finally let him go. He didn’t offer to drive him. That night, he had a few things to think about, his brothers, his mom, Adam’s weird silence over the song he wrote—the song they wrote together, and lonely Christmases that would never be celebrated.

* * *

 

Adam didn’t expect to see his friends until after Christmas. Even though school had ended with the holidays looming and the population of Henrietta was slashed by some five thousand teenage boys flying out to ski vacations in Aspen and Switzerland, work had not slowed down, and the lack of classes allowed Adam to take a few more shifts across his different jobs. It meant that he didn’t have to sit at home and mope or put himself in any danger of getting hit. The additional income went towards appeasing his dad’s temper for whenever he came home late despite there being no school. He spent daytime working at the factory, studiously avoiding straying anywhere near the scrap yard for fear of encountering Kavinsky. After that one chance meeting, he wasn’t keen on any manner of a repeat performance: Kavinsky wrote and played good enough music but the words were not ones Adam wanted to sing, and he sure as hell did not want to get paid in drugs. His face still smarted with the last beating and that had just been weed. He shuddered to imagine what manner of hell he would be subjected to if he was ever arrested for cocaine possession. That would have been the end of everything.

On Christmas Eve, Adam received a call, just before he had been about to leave the house for his morning shift at the convenience store. It was Gansey. He wanted to know what he was doing for Christmas, whether he would be having dinner with his parents, whether it snowed where he was, whether he was okay. Adam told him in a dull voice that he was okay. He would be working three shifts that day—four hours at the store, six hours at the factory, and another four hours at Boyd’s. No, Gansey, there’s no Christmas dinner, no, Gansey, it never snows in the trailer park, yes, Gansey, I’ll still remember to eat, there’s instant noodles in the pantry, and some dry bread… and so on. After Gansey was sufficiently convinced that Adam was not getting beaten up or otherwise horribly abused on the holiday, he wished Adam a happy Christmas and finally hung up. His mother stared at him for a long time before she went back to her trashy three-day old tabloid to clip more coupons that would save him four cents on a small tube of toothpaste, or some similar deal. The coupons would probably expire tomorrow, so he needed to be sure he got paid that day or there would be no toothpaste, no microwave dinner, and probably no running water if they didn’t pay the overdue bill on the kitchen counter.

He sighed. The truth was he was not okay. He had spent the better part of the night lying awake in his bed, replaying the last night he had been with his friends, how they had all looked at him when he said his family didn’t celebrate the holidays, when he said he would be working, when he didn’t say he would be alone, but it hung in the air anyway, like a tired love song.

It wasn’t that Adam felt bad about working or being alone on the Christmas holiday. He had spent many holidays before alone and either working or studying or otherwise looking for ways to make himself as scarce at home as possible. Adam Parrish was used to being alone. He was used to finding ways to make himself useful to pass the time when other people used it to make meaningful family connections over holidays. But he had spent so much time in the past few weeks with his friends that having them suddenly gone felt like a cavity that ached and throbbed and he couldn’t stop himself constantly prodding it so it hurt more, ached more, wanted more.

 _What do you want, Adam?_ He asked himself constantly, disgusted with his own lonesome company.

He zipped up his coveralls to his neck. It was mid-morning on Christmas Day. He had spent the last four hours waiting for something to do at the auto shop, but it seemed the dearth of Raven boys in Henrietta took with it the soccer moms, and the weary truckers, the occasional businessman… There was nothing to do. He had finished the entire holidays’ worth of homework in the past two days of work slump. He’d cleaned up the auto shop, hosed down the garage slots, polished the counter in the waiting room, logged in his receipts. Adam had been tasked to close up Boyd’s shop by noon. It was ten o’clock. It didn’t look like anything was going to happen and he was freezing his ass in the inadequate heating of the waiting room.

Absently, he rubbed his hands, put the dry, chapped skin to his lips and tried to breathe warm air over his cold, mostly dead fingers. Maybe he could close up early. He should probably go home anyway. There was laundry to be washed and he needed to fix a loose stitch on his school slacks. He tried to hit his school books again, turning the pages to the upcoming lesson in Latin to review noun declensions. His eyes glazed over the text, and he could recite the words to himself with little to no effort at recall. It was almost too easy.

The door chime tinkled quietly. Adam looked up as the door swung open to admit a fuming Ronan Lynch. He almost choked with relief, staring wonderingly at Ronan as he stomped to the counter, hurling his car keys at Adam, before he caught himself and lowered his gaze. The keys skittered across the counter and came to a stop an inch from where his arms cradled his head over his textbook. Adam dropped his head back into the crook of his arms, staring at the keys until he went cross-eyed. He studiously avoided looking at Ronan Lynch.

Ronan was still in his suit. It was different from what he wore when Adam saw him on Thanksgiving. This was Ronan at his finest: he was black lines and sharp angles, the cut of his jacket impeccable, striped red and charcoal tie flawless on crisp, immaculate white shirt. On Thanksgiving, Ronan had folded up his sleeves and loosened his collar. Today, his cheekbones threatened to cut a swath through the haze of Adam’s mid-morning boredom, his lip curled into a snarl, exposing straight, white teeth that gleamed in the meager sunlight that streamed through the tinted windows of the waiting room.

“Get the fuck up, Parrish,” Ronan demanded as he came to a stop in front of the high counter, chest level with Adam’s cradled head. Adam smelled mint in his breath, woods and summer rain in his aftershave.

Adam dared to glance up. Ronan did not appear to have been born with pores. His face was smooth, impassive marble. Awkwardly pushing his stool back, Adam attempted to put some distance between the two of them, before he pulled his head from his arms and stood up. He couldn’t breathe.

“I thought you were going home to your family,” he said quietly, turning to busy himself with putting away his textbooks so he did not have to look at Ronan Lynch. Something about the way Ronan’s fingers twitched off the buttons of his jacket made Adam’s chest ache sharply. Ronan had a way of filling the room that made it feel like large spaces shrank or maybe his presence was too large to be contained by four walls. It made Adam dizzy.

The scowl on Ronan’s face deepened. When he spoke, the venom in his voice was murderous. “Fucking false alarm. Declan thought mom would be able to go home, but she’s on suicide watch since she woke up. We can’t bring her home.”

“Oh,” Adam said, keeping his eyes low. “Sorry to hear that, I guess.”

Ronan looked at him incredulously, like he knew Adam was not sorry at all. “What time do you finish at this joint?”

He pulled the sleeve up his left wrist to uncover his cheap watch. “Seventy five minutes.” He watched from the corner of his eye as Ronan shrugged out of his jacket, fold it into the crook of his left arm, loosened his tie. His throat felt dry. “I could close early though. No one’s been in here since I got in.”

Ronan smirked, the action at once so incongruous with his suit, impeccable even once loosened and slouched, but at the same time so Ronan that Adam thought he was seeing two images of his friend superimposed on each other. There was the Ronan who went to church and sang hymns and worshipped a distant God, and the Ronan who vandalized sidewalks with colorfully compounded swear words using discarded lipstick tubes he found in a back alley.

“So you won’t mind joining me for a joyride.” It was a statement that Adam had to agree to or he might not make it out of the auto shop waiting room alive.

He sighed and unzipped his coveralls. Maybe it was just as well that there were no customers that came in. He didn’t want to sit in Ronan’s car covered in car grease. It would look too much like Ronan the church pilgrim picked up a hobo on the way to wherever.

“I’ll go get changed.”

Although Ronan eventually got rid of his jacket and tie, Adam continued to feel ridiculously underdressed in the three layers of ratty wool sweaters he wore to keep out the cold. One of his gloves had a hole on the ring finger so he cut off all the ends of both gloves down to between the first and second knuckles. It was the only pair he owned, and the tips of his fingers were slowly turning blue from the cold. He clenched and unclenched his fists to try to bring some heat to his extremities and Ronan flicked a scathing glance at him from the driver’s seat. Adam turned to stare out the window. Ronan didn’t say anything, but a moment later, he felt one of the vents move to direct heat to the general direction where his hands lay on his lap.

They drove for a while in awkward silence, Ronan scowling at the open road, white knuckles gripping the wheel, and Adam staring out the window as the countryside became an endless expanse of forests and greenery and graying fields in the winter. It didn’t snow, but it may as well have. The mists rising out of the forests lent a somber, frigid look to the countryside. After a while, Ronan probably got sick of the sound of Adam’s ragged breathing and turned on the radio. Despite the loud blare of music, Adam eventually found himself lulled to sleep by the quiet hum of the BMW’s engine, and the expansive gray nothingness outside the car.

When he awoke, they were parked in front of a pompous-looking red brick building. Adam didn’t realize where they were but the clock on the dash told him it was mid-afternoon and he had slept through two hours of the bass lines of the most ridiculous electronica ever played on radio waves. The car was quiet now though. Ronan had shut off the engine and the cold was beginning to seep in insidiously. Adam rubbed his eyes with the pads of his fingers and tried not to crack his jaw when he yawned.

“Where are we?”

He didn’t know if they had stopped somewhere, but Ronan had changed out of his suit into his regular winter clothes. Adam wanted to tug at the fleece lining of his gray jacket to see if it was really as warm as it looked. His gloves were black and leather, probably also fleece-lined, and worth a small fortune. He’d seen those things from glossy magazine ads before and had salivated over more than the expensive looking gloves in the pictures.

“We’re going to see my mom,” Ronan said simply, before swinging his long body out of the car and rummaging at the boot to bring out his small amp and guitar. He didn’t wait for Adam to get out and walked up the entrance of the building. Adam guessed they were two and a half hours from Henrietta, and there was nothing else to do but follow Ronan Lynch into the hospice that looked more like a fancy New York hotel than an assisted living facility.

Ronan had never talked of his parents to Adam, except for the one time he mentioned his father’s death. Adam could only vaguely recall seeing photos of Ronan’s parents on the evening news when Niall’s murder had been a large ripple in the placid lake of Henrietta news. Seeing Aurora Lynch sitting quietly in the elegant dining room of the hospice, a small plate of half-eaten apple strudel in front of her, dessert fork politely turned down on the side of the plate, he could see no sign of the stormy good looks of the two elder Lynch brothers, but she looked exactly like Matthew Lynch. Her golden hair hung in soft curls, framing an ethereal face straight out of a fairy tale. Even in her forties, she seemed eternally young and ageless, her skin warm with the ambient light of the dining room, wrinkles conspicuously absent even around areas where women of her age would typically have them. Up close, he realized she had the same beautiful high definition skin that did not appear to have pores or other curious imperfections of human skin, as Ronan. It made both of them look body snatched. Adam was acutely aware of exactly how many thousands of freckles dotted his skin even in the winter.

Aurora smiled radiantly at the sight of her middle child as Ronan approached her with a curious tenderness to his face, sharp features softening as he folded into a hug and settled beside his mother. Adam cautiously look the chair across from them, feeling awkward and out of place, but so warm in the extravagant dining room.

“My dear,” she spoke with a curious accent that Adam eventually realized was Irish. Ronan’s family was Irish, that much he knew. “You missed Declan and Matthew. They just left.”

Ronan exhaled loudly, what may have been a snort. “Wasn’t intending on seeing Declan at all.”

“He means well, Ronan,” she said reproachfully, before she turned to Adam, still smiling that placid smile. He had never seen anyone smile like Aurora Lynch, the way the corners of her eyes crinkled gently, the upturn of pink lips. He wondered if the orderlies put on any make-up for their charges, but it didn’t appear like she wore any. She was just that beautiful. “Who have you brought with you?”

Ronan’s eyes flicked to him and Adam felt fracture lines snaking all over his face, like he was about to break at the sight of savagely handsome Ronan and his unbelievably beautiful mother. Ronan appeared to have forgotten that he was there with him. “Adam’s a friend from school, mom.”

Aurora reached across the table to touch Adam’s fingertips. Her hands were soft and warm against the cold, callused pads of his fingers. “It’s so rare that I get to meet Ronan’s friends now. You must be very important to him.”

“Mom,” Ronan groused, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. Aurora chided him quietly.

“Declan has brought Ashley here twice, and Matty’s friends have been over a number of times already.” There was a tinge of a laugh in her voice as Ronan protested that it would be very boring for his friends to meet her if she didn’t talk. “I remember every time you visit, you know. You’re always so angry.”

“I’m not angry.”

Adam listened to them banter. It was gentle, quiet talk. Aurora would tease her son, and Ronan would look alternately mortified that Adam was there to even hear what his mother had to say and strangely pleased at the distant smile on Adam’s face as he listened. It was a strange sight: the sneering, scowling Ronan Lynch who picked fights with everything that walked on two legs became a smiling, blushing sixteen-year-old when his mother teased him. Adam wondered if this was how family should be. Aurora and Ronan did not look like the perfect magazine cutout of a happy mother and son. They were still after all sitting in the dining room of an assisted living facility. But he had never experienced the kind of happiness that Ronan exuded as he sat there with his mother, talking about everything and nothing that a teenage boy would talk to his mother about. Sometimes, she would turn to Adam, politely asking him about school, his jobs (Ronan had evidently talked about him to his mother before as she knew he worked to support his education), the music he made with her son and their other friends. Adam would answer politely, told her about the classes he shared with Ronan, about the music, about Gansey and Noah and Blue.

Adam wondered why Ronan had brought him there. Seeing and hearing them talk brought a strange sort of nostalgia, possibly from a distant past when Adam was not yet the unwanted teenage pest he was to his parents. He did not recall ever having any sort of quiet happiness with his parents, but there had been grandparents before, an aunt who had once given him a hug and a dollar and told him the he could buy candy from the corner store. None of them had been beautiful and perfect and gentle as Aurora Lynch, but they were distant memories of a once upon a time when Adam Parrish was not made of fracture lines and bruises and healing stitches.

He excused himself quietly when the conversation turned to Ronan’s brothers. Aurora clearly did not approve of the near-constant violence surrounding Ronan’s relationship with Declan. Ronan countered that he didn’t care for Declan’s opinions on his lack of responsibility or drive to a future that didn’t consist of pretending to be an aspiring rock star. Adam felt that this was no longer anything his presence would be welcome for, so he drifted out of the dining room and out back onto the driveway. Though Ronan and Aurora had been the only people other than the bustling orderlies that passed them by in that room, Adam felt the familiar suffocating feeling of being trapped in a rapidly shrinking space with Ronan Lynch. It was a strange feeling. He didn’t know when that started because he never felt it when they were in the company of their other friends, but alone with Ronan or sitting there with him and his mom, Adam felt like he was being slowly smothered. And it wasn’t that he felt bad. It was that it was so strange that gave him that suffocated feeling.

The hospice had a large garden sprawling behind the large red building, and the sky was darkening to a mottled magenta-gray as sunset approached. He walked for a while, among rose bushes and wrought iron benches, until once again, his fingers, and now his ears, couldn’t stand the cold and he had to wander back inside the hospice reception so that he could regain feeling in his fingers.

He found that Ronan and Aurora had moved to a common sitting room. It was almost dinner time so there were no other residents in the sitting room. They had mostly moved to the dining area, and Adam could see this was why Ronan had moved to a different room: he had set up his amp and was singing for his mother. Adam stood, unseen, in the doorway and listened. He had never heard Ronan sing except when he was drunk. Even when Ronan taught him the new song he had written, he had gone about it with each line cut off from the other until Adam got the tune. It had been stilted and robotic and strange. But here in the hospice, listening to Ronan sing, Adam thought he felt something vital inside him break.

_And though the world would  
_ _Never understand  
_ _This unlikely union  
_ _And why it still stands  
_ _Someday we will be set free.  
_ _Pray and believe_

_When the light disappears  
_ _And when this world's insincere  
_ _You'll be safe here  
_ _When nobody hears you scream  
_ _I'll scream with you  
_ _You'll be safe here_

He heard Ronan stop singing and tell Aurora about their friendship, and how Adam had constantly felt like a porcelain figurine about to break. Ronan never mentioned his name but Adam felt the fracture lines all the same. He didn’t want to hear him ask his mother if he shouldn’t help because Adam didn’t expect or want him to. He didn’t want to see the kind look on Aurora’s face as she told her son that there were some demons that couldn’t be exorcised by the presence of other people. He didn’t want to dwell on the fact that she was right: his friends were merely an escape. Just like the music. In the end, he had to walk back to the hell he came from.

So Adam turned on his heels and ran outside, into the waiting Richmond night.

  
 

It was the end of visiting hours by the time Ronan realized that Adam was missing. The nurses had already led Aurora back to her room. Ronan had a brief argument with her doctor about her readiness to be released to the real world, but it was a waste of breath. Although she conversed normally with her children and even with the other hospice residents and nurses, it was a standard practice to maintain potentially volatile patients on suicide watch after their immediate recovery. Ronan had gone through a similar monitoring period when he was in hospital limbo after his own suicide attempt. His mother exhibited much better, more promising signs of recovery than he ever did, and he didn’t seem so keen to kill himself now.

That certainty that he wouldn’t kill either himself or someone else was dangerously close to dying a slow painful death when he finally left his mother in her room to look for Adam so they could start the drive home. Adam was not at the dining room, where a number of other visitors were still finishing up supper. He was not in the reception waiting area or the sitting room or anywhere within the building at all.

The nurse at the front desk told him that they recalled his friend stepping out of the building at least a few hours before he had even started looking. The evening shift security guard looked around the gardens and reported no one loitering among the fancy cut hedges and evergreen trees. Two other nurses coming back from a cigarette break outside the facility grounds said they saw someone fitting Adam’s description (“tall, skinny dude, freckles”) wandering down Monument Avenue towards the Museum District.

Ronan pulled up the lapels of his jacket, swearing under his breath as a blast of cold air hit his face as stepped out of the building. It was nine thirty. He had less than three hours to find Adam and drive the both of them back to Henrietta in time for Adam’s curfew or he was going to be black and blue again after another holiday. He debated for a while if he wanted to take the car so they could just drive out immediately once he found him, but thought the better of it. Adam was on foot. How far could he possibly get in a city he’d probably never even been in?

  
 

Adam did, in fact, get quite far. He intended to take a quick walk around the perimeter of the hospice’s property only to clear his head, but the noise of the city in the early evening was cloying, suffocating. He didn’t want to go back to the property grounds where the cold evening air threatened him with hypothermia. Out on the street, the whiz of passing vehicles and the snatches of conversation he overheard from passersby on their way to Christmas dinner dates and evening parties lent a warm blanket that quickly became too heavy and oppressive. So Adam walked further.

He turned a corner towards S Boulevard, passed the Virginia Historical Society building, plowed deeper into the Museum District, where there were less people, before stopping on a park bench outside the St. Benedict Church. The church behind him was open but empty. The faithful had already filed out much earlier in the evening, after the Latin mass.

Adam collapsed on the park bench, rubbed a tired, shaking hand to his face. He had no idea what he was doing. He didn’t know the time, his watch had stopped somewhere between the conversation with Aurora and Ronan and walking out into the city. He just couldn’t think: there was an incessant buzzing in his head that rivaled the evening sounds of a mega city. In the back of his mind he heard Ronan singing the song in his deep, melodic voice in an endless loop, the quite strums of guitar matched the sound of insects humming in the still darkness around him. Streetlights with warm orange glow buzzed quietly in the background.

He shut his eyes and willed himself quiet for a while. It was getting late. He thought he should probably be getting up and walking back to the hospice.

The sound of a can clattering somewhere in the gloom woke him out of his reverie. Adam thought he heard more than saw Ronan’s booted feet approaching even though the long shadows cast by the tall hedge around the church shrouded the paved pathway leading up to the church in darkness. Adam didn’t look up, merely pulled his feet under him and curled in on himself. He didn’t want to leave just yet.

“You could have told me where you were going, Parrish,” Ronan said coldly, clearly annoyed. Adam heard another rock skitter on the pavement. He looked up from his hands and saw Ronan standing a few feet from where he sat, kicking random pieces of garbage and rocks in his path. “Why do you always have to be such an ass?”

Adam didn’t quite know the answer to that, so he didn’t bother to reply. Ronan was not anywhere where his long legs could hit him, but the sudden swing of movement made his stomach curl. Adam found himself staring transfixed as more rocks were kicked. His hands were no longer shaking because every muscle in his body was locked in rigid fear. Only his eyes darted, following every movement of Ronan’s jean-clad legs. His skin crawled from anticipation. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he tried to rationalize that Ronan was probably just blowing off steam. He wasn’t going to hit him. But Adam couldn’t stop staring at the jerky movements of Ronan’s legs.

“Hey, Parrish.”

Adam’s eyes were stuck on where Ronan had been swiping gloved hands at the unyielding tall hedge. Ronan was no longer there, and dimly, Adam could feel that he had moved to stand in front of him, but his eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere behind him and he couldn’t move his head to turn to the front where Ronan was. He couldn’t move his hands, which covered his face.

“Parrish, what the fuck.” There was a note of concern in the annoyed sigh that followed. “Would you get the fuck up and stop slamming out of places like some low-rent Cinderella? It’s getting real old real fast, man.”

He almost wanted laugh at the absurd metaphor. He didn’t know whether Ronan was smiling that nasty, unpleasant smile of his, the one full of teeth like knives and venom, brutally, savagely handsome in the cold yellow streetlight. But he couldn’t move. His muscles appear to have locked in rigor mortis and Adam wondered if it was possible he died somewhere while sitting outside that church and he was just watching the aftermath from the cold, dead eyes of his rapidly cooling body.

“Adam! Fuck, man, would you get up and say something? You’re scaring me!”

It was when Ronan reached out to touch him, perhaps nudge him awake in case he thought Adam was actually asleep, that the tremors started. In the back of his mind, rational thought gave way to the insidious sound of his father’s drunken slur whenever he would beat him. “Get up, you useless piece of trash.” Like an endless loop, a broken record, echoing in the darkness and overwhelming the sound of Ronan’s voice.

The tremor in Adam’s hands spread like wildfire until he shook like a dead leaf in the cold winter air.

“S-sorry,” he stuttered brokenly. “I need a minute.”

It was a long moment of silence before the shaking stopped, before his muscles finally loosened enough for him to pull his head out of cradle of his arms, before he pulled his legs out to stretch on the pavement, before he could finally look up and face Ronan. Ronan sat beside him, blue eyes almost black in the darkness, wide with horror and concern. Adam noted absently that his lips were starting to turn blue. He had taken off his jacket and draped it over Adam’s shoulders when he wouldn’t move, when he started shaking like a trapped, injured animal. Adam pulled off the jacket from his shoulders. It smelled like summer and woods and moss. He handed it back to Ronan, who took it wordlessly, still staring at him, that horrified stare.

Adam stood up slowly, feeling around for any more threats, any sudden movement. When there was none, he hung his head and extended a hand to Ronan. He took it and nearly pulled Adam down as he stood up.

“What the fuck was that?” The horror had given way to suspicion.

The leather of Ronan’s gloves was cool and soft to the touch. Adam let go once he was up. He sighed.

“Nothing.” He shook his head as he lurched forward, into the glow of the streetlights, and he squinted and shut his eyes tiredly, rubbing at his face with freezing fingers. He didn’t know how to tell Ronan that he had just triggered a panic attack without Ronan going weird on him, so he pretended he was okay. He should be okay. Ronan was his friend and he knew what Adam went through. He wouldn’t hurt him.

“We should get going,” he said quietly.

Ronan easily fell into step with him as they walked back in silence. He didn’t bother slipping back into his jacket and tossed it over Adam’s shoulders again when he saw his lips tremble as they crossed Monument Avenue to return to the parking lot of the hospice. He jostled Adam’s shoulder as they approached the car.

“You’re a fucking asshole, did you know that?” Adam finally said, tugging at the jacket around his shoulders. It felt warm. As he gripped the door of the BMW, he stole a look at Ronan’s face, washed golden in the cold light of the streetlamps. Ronan flashed him a grin, all teeth. He shook his head and finally felt the corners of his own mouth twitch. “Don’t call me Cinderella.”

They made it back to Henrietta in record time. On the way back to the trailer park, Ronan stopped at a McDonald’s drive-thru, ordered five Happy Meals so he could get all of the free toys and once he got it, lined them up on the dashboard of the BMW, before they tucked in to a greasy feast of chicken nuggets, fries and flat, overly sweetened Coke, while illegally parked on the side of the road. Ronan picked a small fight over the one burger meal he bought before they split it evenly and wolfed their halves down in three bites. Adam remembered that he had not had anything to eat the entire day.

When Ronan finally pulled up in front of the doublewide, he scooped up the five plastic toys on his dashboard and dumped them all on Adam’s lap. They were nugget-sized Voltron figurines, Ronan’s Christmas gift to one Adam Parrish who lived in 21 Antietam Lane. Adam attempted to return them and convince Ronan that he didn’t need to give him a Christmas gift because he had nothing to give himself, and he didn’t celebrate Christmas anyway, and Ronan responded with an indignant “I’m bonding with you! Hey!”

They laughed good-naturedly at each other’s nerdy interests (Ronan’s favorite character was Lance, and Adam’s favorite character was Keith, but the one from the original series, the serious leader with the bad mullet, and Ronan made fun of how dumb the original series was where all the male characters fell in love with Princess Allura when she was the worst whiny female character ever conceived on an eighties cartoon, to which Adam countered that there were plenty other whiny female characters and the eighties was not known for strong female lead characters anyway, which was a pity, but at least the current Voltron Force now had an awesome female Pidge, and so on), before Adam sighed and thanked Ronan quietly, pocketing the toys until his jeans pockets bulged awkwardly. And with a final smile in the darkness, he stepped out of the BMW and quietly crept into his room. His father did not hear him—Robert Parrish had started drinking early to celebrate Christmas, and at twelve thirty, he was passed out on the ratty recliner in the living room and did not so much as let out a snore when Adam stole into the house.

He lay in his shitty room in the darkness for a while, pulling out the toys from his pockets and lining them up in front of him, on the threadbare pillow. He stared at the five plastic robot lions, black, red, blue, green, yellow, replaying the Voltron formation monologue from the original eighties series, and smiled at the ridiculousness of the quote Ronan picked. He couldn’t stop smiling over everything he heard from Ronan that day, his casually asking Adam to accompany him to the assisted living facility, the quiet drive to Richmond, the beautiful song, his quiet questions to his mother, and Aurora’s kind answers. It was the strangest Christmas Adam had ever had. It was also the best Christmas, and Adam Parrish had never celebrated Christmas in his life.

When he finally got up somewhere in the vicinity of 3:00 AM to change to his bed clothes, he realized that he was still wearing Ronan’s jacket, and that he had been warm in it the entire time he lay in his cold room in the doublewide. The Parrish home did not have any manner of heating, so after changing to pajamas, Adam shrugged back into the jacket and curled in on himself in the middle of his tiny bed, and stared at the five lion figurines on his pillow until he finally fell asleep, warm and happy for the first time in seventeen Christmases.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song quoted here is [You'll Be Safe Here](https://youtu.be/Tg-JErS6ieY) by Rivermaya. It's a beautiful song.


	13. Jump Then Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Noah knows everyone's secrets.

On Boxing Day, Blue called Adam at his job at the auto shop to tell him that her mother and aunts made pie and that they had saved some for him.  Adam had told her it was awkward: he did not want to appear at Blue’s house as if he was still her boyfriend, and hadn’t they just agreed back in Thanksgiving that they were finally over, he was finally letting her go and he wasn’t going to be a dick about it, but then Maura, Blue’s mother was on the phone and telling him that Persephone made the pie and she really wanted him to have some, and then it was Calla telling him that he was being a dick by refusing, and that, by the way, the ladies of 300 Fox Way did not need for him to bring any gifts. They all just really wanted him to eat pie.

So at four o’clock, after his shift at the factory, he stopped by Aglionby to shower very quickly, scrubbing any remnants of diesel and motor oil from under his nails, made sure to comb his hair (or at least pat it down so he didn’t look like a feral child), then shrugged into a clean change of clothes, before he biked to 300 Fox Way. It was even colder on Boxing Day than it had been on Christmas or the days before, and Adam still had Ronan’s jacket in his backpack. He was embarrassed that he had even forgotten to return it the previous night, as Ronan had quite obviously been cold without it when they drove back from Richmond, but he wasn’t getting paid for his job at the convenience store until the thirtieth, and he didn’t really have any money to spare to have the jacket dry-cleaned before he returned it, so when the cold eventually became too much for him to bear and his shivering was so bad that he couldn’t pedal forward, he stopped and brought the jacket out and cautiously put it on.

He had slept through the early morning wearing the jacket and had almost not made it to work that morning. It was still warm, still smelled faintly of Ronan’s cologne or aftershave (whatever it was, it smelled nice), mixed with the faint scent of gasoline—a stench that always seemed to follow Adam wherever he went, and stuck on all things he put on himself. He reminded himself that it would just be for one more day, and then he could drop it off to the Laundromat for dry-cleaning, pick it up and pay for the cleaning when he got paid and just return it to Ronan.

Blue was waiting at their front door when he arrived. She looked like a lawn gnome, in several layers of knitted scarves, sweaters, and a tie-dyed beanie. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold, lips upturned in an impish smile to greet him. She was still so beautiful.

“Hey,” he said quietly, leaning his bike against the mailbox post. There were several cars parked on the curb near the house. Adam knew that Blue’s mother and her aunts were psychics, but he didn’t know that they still did readings on holidays, and he always thought psychics wouldn’t have their shop open past five, but he was evidently wrong.

Blue picked up on his observation of the cars quickly as she led him inside. “There’s no one here. Shop’s closed, I think. These are Orla’s boyfriends’.” She flashed him a mischievous grin, and Adam quirked an eyebrow. He knew about Blue’s cousin, Orla, and her many different boyfriends. Once Adam had asked Blue how Orla managed to tell her boyfriends apart—there just seemed to be so many of them, and he thought it would have been immensely tiring to entertain so many people separately but all at once. Blue told him that Orla saw the boyfriends only once a year, and apparently, Boxing Day was it.

Adam expected there should be a lot more fists thrown and men yelling and fighting and otherwise trying to kill each other once they found out they weren’t the only one, but the house was curiously quiet when they entered. It didn’t look like the boyfriends had any issue being one of many, and Adam thought maybe they were all already dead and Orla was probably canoodling with the victor now. It was probably a lot like a praying mantis courtship dance. Victor gets to mate the female, and then she kills him. He shuddered at the thought and hoped he and Blue wouldn’t have to call 911.

“I thought you said Maura, Persephone and Calla were giving pie,” he said, looking at Blue curiously.

Blue waved a careless hand at him as she led him to the back yard. This was her favorite place. When they were still dating, the two of them had sat under the large beech tree in her backyard for many nights, talking about everything and nothing. Blue did the talking. Adam did the nothing. Mostly, he listened to her talk: she was a creature of grand ideas and deep convictions, and Adam sometimes envied her. He could never bring himself to care as passionately as she did on things like equal rights and environmental preservation. He was usually too tired with trying to keep himself afloat, alive even, to care about anything else.

“They went out, but your pie’s in the fridge. We can get it later.”

Blue sat on the bench under the tree. Adam found a sizeable gap between the tree’s protruding roots and fitted his slim hips in that, cupping his face with his hands that he folded over his bent knees. He watched Blue quietly. She seemed to be struggling internally with something she clearly wanted to say but couldn’t bring herself to.

“Hey,” he said again, when she was still quiet after a few moments. It was so unlike Blue. “You can tell me, you know. Whatever’s bothering you.”

Blue scrunched her face up, as if she didn’t believe him at all. “Adam,” she said softly. He tilted his head. Blue was a person of great exuberance. She very rarely spoke quietly the way she did, so Adam listened to her more intently than he had before. “We’re friends, right?”

Adam exhaled. He thought he could feel where this was leading to. He didn’t say anything, but nodded his head, as awkwardly as having his chin on his hands would permit.

Blue wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Then…” She sighed and stared at her hands and blurted in a rush, “I’m dating Gansey, I’m sorry!”

He blinked, not quite comprehending at first. He heard her words but they didn’t make sense to him just—“Oh,” he said. Blue had finally deigned to meet his eyes and she arched an eyebrow at the word. “ _Oh_.”

“Yeah. That.” She sighed again, her brown eyes were large and reflected the gathering shadows of the dusk. “Are you mad?”

He didn’t quite know what to say. Blue was his first love. She was the first girl that he had ever kissed. But that was a year ago. It felt like a lifetime. He didn’t know if he had any right to be mad at her, or at Gansey for that matter, though it would have been nice if Gansey had said something, but maybe it wasn’t something guys said to each other. He certainly couldn’t imagine Gansey walking up to him to tell him, “Hey man, just wanted to let you know, I’m shacking up with your ex, we cool right?” Gansey probably wouldn’t be as crude as how he thought, though. Maybe he just didn’t know what to say. Just like Adam.

“I’m not mad.”

Blue had shut her eyes in dread when he didn’t speak for a long time. Her eyes flew open just then, shining with surprise. “You’re not?”

Adam thought about it. No, he wasn’t mad. They were finally over, he realized. He’d let her go and she had decided to move on. And that was all right.

“I’m not.”

Blue got up and threw her arms around him. “Thank God!” She hugged around his arms tightly. Adam could feel the months they had grown apart. They were still friends, she was right. But they were different people now than they were when they had last had their arms around each other. And he was alright with that too.

He patted her head awkwardly and tried to wriggle out of the hug, and laughed when she hugged even tighter. “Ugh, Blue, I can’t breathe!”

She laughed too, letting him go finally, and moved back so he could get up. “I thought we were gonna be awkward about it, so I had Persephone bake pie.” She grinned at him when he mock-glared at her. “I knew you couldn’t resist.”

“Look at you, dating Gansey and still trying to manipulate me,” Adam laughed again when she elbowed his ribs. “Come on, that pie isn’t going to eat itself.”

* * *

 

Ronan Lynch usually could not be bothered with managing his own chores. When he lived in the Barns, Aurora had always kept her boys in line and Ronan and his brothers were charged with different chores around the farm. His usually involved mucking in the fields and taking care of cows and chicken, or fixing up loose fixtures, things neither of his brothers could be bothered to do. Declan, ever the desk-bound politician, handled the taxes. Matthew usually took care of the chores around the house—doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms, laundry. Ronan had never been one to bother with laundering his own clothes until Declan evicted all of them from the Barns and he was suddenly forced to worry about washing whites with colored fabrics.

In the business of domestic life once he moved to Monmouth, Gansey had been the absolute worst. He was the rich kid who had been waited on hand and foot all his life. He didn’t know how to cook so all they owned was a microwave, a coffee machine and a large basket of chips that magically refilled every Saturday morning. He didn’t know how to wash dishes, so apart from a few coffee mugs and teaspoons, the three of them constantly ate out of paper plates (Blue had chastised Gansey over this a number of times, but old habits died hard, and Richard Gansey III also did not know how to operate a dishwasher, so none was ever bought). When it came to laundry, though, Noah was mercifully domestic and almost always happily included Ronan’s dirty clothes in his laundry pile, and Ronan was aware of at least three occasions of Noah sneaking into his room at Gansey’s behest just so they could root out all the dirty socks and underwear hiding in the corners of his messy room, after he complained of washing ten socks that had no pairs.

Consequently, when both boys went home to their respective families, Ronan was left to manage the mechanics of domestic life on his own, and although he wasn’t quite as helpless as Gansey, he couldn’t, for the life of him, manage his own laundry. It was practically the easiest chore to do: just dump the clothes in the washer, press a few buttons, and when it’s done, freshly laundered clothes! But with the inclusion of the suit he wore to church on Christmas morning the previous day, Ronan simply could not be bothered. His suit needed dry-cleaning so he would have to take a trip downtown anyway to get it cleaned, and may as well bring the rest of his clothes so he didn’t need to bother cleaning them himself.

The Laundromat was on the same block facing St. Agnes church as the convenience store Adam worked in. Adam would probably not be working there. Adam usually worked mornings here, and it was already late afternoon. Probably just as well to put a little distance between the two of them. Ronan felt a little too happy with the previous day spent almost entirely in Adam’s company and it was getting harder to remind himself of expectations where Adam was concerned. Still, the smile Adam had shot him at the very end of the night, just before he stepped out of his car and disappeared into the trailer park, was a rare gem in the silent tragedy that was Adam Parrish’s life. Ronan held on to that smile well into the following morning.

The Laundromat was operated by a local couple who had a teenage daughter. She was always the one at the store whenever Ronan dropped off his dry cleaning and she was the one on the counter now. Ronan found her insufferable because she wouldn’t stop blushing whenever he dropped off his dirty clothes, and he wasn’t exactly equipped to handle flustered teenage girls interested in gay boys bringing in their laundry.

That afternoon though, dealing with the laundry girl was the least of his problems, because there were two other people there already badgering said girl. Ronan didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially not the two very obviously Aglionby boys at the counter. For fuck’s sake, how hard would it be to just drop off the dirty clothes and leave?

One of the boys half-turned the moment he entered, and his general annoyance blossomed into full on rage as Joseph Kavinsky flashed him an amused smirk. Even though it was winter and gray and the late afternoon was slowly turning to dusk, Kavinsky wore his gigantic white plastic-rimmed shades and that vacuous, drug-addled smile. The white mink fur on his trenchcoat looked curiously bedraggled, like it had been skinned off roadkill.

“Oh hey, Lynch, so glad you could join our party.” He leered at Ronan, who resisted the urge to smash a fist into his face. Briefly, Ronan wondered how Kavinsky wasn’t constantly getting his face shoved up lockers at school. He would gladly have been the first one to do it if they encountered each other more often. His knuckles itched to wipe the shit-eating grin on the other boy’s lips. Kavinsky’s smile widened as Ronan walked up to the counter, pile of dirty clothes in hand, and dumped them on Jiang, who had been leaning over the counter, sweet-talking the laundry girl.

“The fuck, you dickwad!” Jiang yelled, arms swinging. Ronan sprang out of the way and Jiang ended up hitting Kavinsky’s shoulder. The laundry girl shrieked as he fell down.

“Tsk tsk,” Kavinsky said, catching himself with outstretched hands. His sunglasses stayed resolutely on his face, as did the infuriating smile. He gripped Ronan’s arm and dragged himself up. The glint of his teeth was obscene as he grinned up at Ronan. Kavinsky pretended to simper and Ronan shoved him away. If anything, the smile was even wider than before, baiting him.

Ronan shook his head and batted a gloved hand at his jacket-covered arm where Kavinsky’s coat left a swath of white hair. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

“Aww,” Kavinsky cooed and sounded anything but sorry. “Princess got his panties in a wad. What’s the matter, Lynch? Dick Three not get you off this morning? Oh, oh! Blue balls on Christmas morning coz Dicky’s Skype sex is not enough!”

“Fucking leave Gansey out of this,” Ronan intoned in a voice that brooked no dissent. He would break Kavinsky’s face.

Kavinsky cackled as Jiang swiped off Ronan’s clothes to the laundry girl. She gave a long-suffering glance at the three of them and scooped up all of the clothes to count it in the back. Now they were alone on the main room. Ronan eyed her impatiently when she left.

Kavinsky stood up and started leafing through the plastic-covered clothing hanging from hooks in the ceiling. “So lemme take a guess here, Lynch. If not Disney Princess Gansey, definitely not Czerny. I mean, who the fuck would wanna bang that guy? I mean, man, you’ve got to be the most desperate dick-wrangling virgin, stateside, if you wanna bang that fucking limp noodle smurf.”

Jiang sniggered. “Speak for yourself, K.”

“Suck my dick, asshat, don’t see me asking for your fucking opinion.” Kavinsky’s grin was wild as he turned to Ronan. “Not Parrish. Ohohohoho, you can’t have that one, Lynch. I own that shit.”

Ronan wasn’t sure he understood what was happening. One minute he was standing at the counter waiting for his receipt, and the next he had grabbed Kavinsky by the mink fur on his collar and shoved him up one of the churning washing machines lining the walls of the laundromat, the action finally knocking Kavinsky’s sunglasses off his face. It clattered noisily to the top of the washing machine.

“Fucking leave Parrish alone, you STD-riddled trash dump.”

If anything, Kavinsky seemed all the more amused, his hazel-gold eyes wild as they bore into Ronan’s icy blue stare. “So it _is_ Parrish.” The vacuous smile turned unpleasant, predatory. “Listen to me, you little cumslut. I found Parrish first. You wanna play? Go fucking dump your trust fund on his Aglionby charity gig and maybe he’ll blow you.”

It wasn’t that Ronan didn’t stop himself. Usually, he made a point not to brawl in public establishments where he could get thrown out, especially places he needed to frequent for one reason or another. Fist fights with Ronan Lynch happened in back alleys with pickpockets thinking a drunken Aglionby sort would be easy pickings, and only to stagger out half-dead with a broken arm, or (and this was Ronan’s favorite sport) beating up Declan on the hood of his shiny, black Volvo. Usually, he made a point not to punch the headlights out of tiny limp noodle smurfs like Kavinsky. Even if he was a dick.

He broke Kavinsky’s nose.

Kavinsky’s hands flew up to his face, the grin twisting into a pained grimace as he tried to hold down the blood streaming to his mouth and straighten his crooked nose back. “I really don’t get the Parrish obsession, man.” His voice was wheezy with pain. “You, me, Dick Three, fucking Tad Carruthers and so many other cockwrangling motherfuckers waiting on fucking Freckle Face and he’s not even that cute, like he’s a fucking One Direction song, you know what I mean? You make me sick.”

Ronan staggered back as Jiang rushed to help Kavinsky up. His right knuckle was bloody, and when he realized the laundry girl had forgotten to pick up his suit jacket, he used it to wipe the blood off and wrinkled his nose in distaste. The jacket was ruined, no point getting it dry-cleaned. Ronan picked up the garment, rolled it under one arm and stalked out of the laundromat. The laundry girl will figure out his clothes when he came back for it the next day.

He stopped by a trashcan on his way to his car and dumped his ruined jacket in, thirty-five hundred dollars of fancy Marc Jacobs design pissed down the drain, before he slammed into his car, turned up the bass lines, and peeled out of the parking lot into the gathering night. It would be hours of mind-numbing speed, cold winter air and loud, throbbing music before Kavinsky’s words stopped bleeding into his ears. In the dead of the night, he drove past the trailer park several times, slowing occasionally to glimpse the light in Adam’s room, but the copse of gray, leafless trees in the driveway blocked any sign of life, so Ronan drove away, only to do it again, and again, until the pitch black night eventually turned gray, and then it started to snow.

* * *

 

Three days later, it had just stopped snowing when Adam stepped out of the laundromat. He folded the clean jacket into his messenger bag and set off on foot, carefully avoiding parts of the sidewalk where slush had gathered so as not to soak through his shoes. Because of the snow, he had been forced to take the bus to get around. Monmouth was within walking distance of the laundromat so he didn’t bother to walk to the bus stop. He cursed quietly, rubbing the fingertips exposed by his fingerless gloves. He hated walking in the cold and Monmouth Manufacturing was at least a fifteen-minute walk.

Ronan’s car was not at the parking lot when he reached there. Adam cursed again. Now he would have to go home and come back some other time, when Ronan was home. He was about to walk back to the main road to walk to the bus stop, when the main door slammed open and Noah, in a hot pink Hannah Montana parka and a neon green beanie to keep the cold out of his ears, skipped-jumped down the stairs and bounded towards Adam.

“Hey, I thought you were in New York,” Adam said by way of greeting. He ran a hand through his hair, acutely feeling the cold air as he looked at Noah’s beanie. Little tufts of pale blond hair peeked out of the beanie and curled around Noah’s pale temples. Noah looked about three feet tall with the gigantic parka.

Noah grinned up at him impishly. He wasn’t wearing gloves, so he shoved his hands into the pockets of his parka. “I forgot some stuff I meant to bring back. Had to take a quick flight back, but hey, at least it means I get to drive up in my car.” He stood on tiptoes in an effort to make himself even to Adam’s height. It was a lost cause. Adam, like Ronan, was easily a head taller than Noah. “What’re you doing here?”

“Oh!” Adam fished into his bag and pulled out the jacket. It was folded neatly and smelled faintly of fabric softener. He handed it to Noah. “I forgot to return it to Ronan. Just… thanks, I guess. If you see him later.” Now it was his turn to shove his hands into his jean pockets. He fidgeted self-consciously, reminded suddenly of the time he and Gansey had accidentally stumbled on Ronan and Noah kissing. He flushed. “Well, um. Happy holidays, I guess.”

He didn’t wait for Noah to say anything. Like Ronan, Noah made him feel extremely awkward in his skin. Although Noah did not have Ronan’s almost animal magnetism that both drew and frightened Adam with emotions he had never had to contend with, even when he had been with Blue, he was still a handsome young man in a rakish sort of way. He could certainly see how his mother had been so taken as to actually be galvanized to find help for Noah when he pretended to have broken down the side of the road near the trailer park. Adam acutely felt how dusty and strange he looked, with the smattering of freckles across his nose, his awkward, uneven haircut, the eyebrows that faded into his lightening tan, and most of all, the constant self-conscious fidget of his hands.

He had almost reached the main road from the turn from Monmouth Avenue when he heard Noah shouting his name. The other boy ran after him on skinny legs and booted feet that skidded on the three inches of snow and slush. The loosened strap of his bondage pants flapped between his legs awkwardly, slowing down his run.

“Adam, wait!”

Adam stopped walking, hands still shoved awkwardly into his pockets. He smiled when Noah stopped in front of him, breathing raggedly from the impromptu sprint. Noah held one pale hand up, fingers twitching, as if to say, “Give me a minute!” as he struggled to catch his breath. His cheeks were flushed from the cold and exertion. Adam stared at the way his lips trembled with every breath and wondered if that was what Ronan had seen right before he kissed Noah.

“Oh my God, you guys and your long legs, fuck!” Noah gasped the expletive as a kitten might growl at an inanimate object. When he had sufficiently regained his breath, he said, “Actually, I lied. I came back here to see you.”

Adam looked at him incredulously. “Me? Why?”

In response, Noah fished into the back pocket of his mercifully black bondage pants and brought out his cellphone. He tapped silently at the screen for a while to bring up Youtube, and then was shoving the screen up Adam’s face. Adam watched in horror as the video finished buffering and resolved into a familiar, ugly backdrop.

It was a video of him in the scrapyard, singing Kavinsky’s song. The Dream Pack fanned out behind him, playing their instruments with impeccable precision: the heavy crash of cymbals from Jiang’s drums, the aggressive riff of bass as Skov raked his pick across metal strings, Swan tilting his head towards Kavinsky as their guitars alternately whined and screamed. And over it, all around it, beckoning, tantalizing, teasing, the naked growl in Adam’s husky voice as he sang. Adam didn’t need to see the tiny red timestamp of the running video. It was taken just a few weeks ago, at the start of winter, when he had been too sick to sing in his own band’s practice and Ronan had graciously let him off because of his cold. And yet there he was, in that scrap yard, singing for Kavinsky. Not just any song, it was Kavinsky’s composition. Adam knew it, because he had written the lyrics for him.

Noah didn’t bother to pause or stop the video as he looked up at Adam’s horrified face. “This was why.”

Narrow blue eyes met earnest gray. Adam searched his friend’s face for any sign of duplicity. “How did you find this?”

“Someone sent it to me,” said Noah, shrugging carelessly. “Not anyone you know. In case you’ve forgotten, K and I went to school together before Aglionby. We have common friends.”

If Noah hadn’t been staring up at him so earnestly, Adam might have cursed up a storm. He heaved a breath. “Are you going to tell Ronan?” He didn’t know what he would do if Ronan or any of his other friends found out. That video was taken just a week after he had fought with all of them and made up. It was taken just days after Ronan confronted him about playing for Kavinsky. But if that video was on Youtube, there was probably no way Ronan or Gansey or Blue wouldn’t find out. All it took was a quick search.

Noah sighed and shut off his phone, slipping it into his back pocket again. He looked tired, and it was only now that Adam noticed that Noah had heavy bags under his over-bright eyes. This had evidently been eating at him for some time. “I’m not going to tell him, Adam. But you are.”

Adam tried to laugh it off. It was just one fucking song. He was making too big a deal of it. Noah was making too big a deal of it. And hadn’t he told Kavinsky that would be the absolute last time? “I don’t need to tell Ronan anything. It’s not his business what I do with Kavinsky.” He glared at Noah. “Frankly, I don’t think I see how it’s yours either.” He started to turn, as if to signal the conversation was over, but Noah reached a hand to his wrist and stopped him.

The pale hand was thin and bony and cold as a corpse. It gripped Adam’s fragile wrist like a vise. “Adam, I don’t think you quite understand how Ronan operates. I know he’s seen you with K, and you might think he’s not making a huge deal about it, but trust me, it _is_.”

Adam remained silent, but he tried, unsuccessfully, to free himself from Noah’s grip. The other boy’s hand wouldn’t let go, and suddenly, Adam found himself forced to stare into the same over-bright gray eyes. The whites of Noah’s eyes had a few broken capillaries, giving him the same tired, dead look Adam had often seen on his mother’s face, whenever Adam came home past his curfew, whenever the beatings started. It was a look that said, _This is your fault, Adam._ His pulse hammered in his neck and on his wrist, but it was slowly getting smothered by the cold dampness of Noah’s palm.

“Ronan doesn’t like to talk about things, Adam, but I assure you, he guards all the people he loves jealously, so shit’s going to go down if you don’t come clean about playing for K on the side.” The gray eyes glittered dangerously, a challenge that matched the tightening of Noah’s grip. Adam felt like he was cutting off his circulation. “I’m not going to lie to you: I like Ronan. It’s a pity he doesn’t really see me that way, but we can’t all have our cake and eat it. So you need to listen to me when I say stop playing with him. You’re playing with fire if you think you can juggle Ronan and K together.”

Adam’s temper flared. Who the fuck did Noah think he was, trying to order him around like that? Adam wasn’t stopping him from trying to eat Ronan’s face, so he didn’t understand why Noah had to get up in arms over one stupid song. With a burst of strength, he yanked his hand free from Noah’s grip and unconsciously rubbed at where he held him. The skin around his wrist was slightly red from the pressure.

“I don’t need you to tell me what to do, Noah,” he said coldly. And then with more force, he added, “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, with Ronan _or_ K.”

Noah just looked at him and shook his head wearily. “Suit yourself.” He sighed and turned away.

Adam spun on his heels and turned the opposite direction, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets furiously as he began to walk. It would be a very long walk home, one that he would spend worrying his lip and wondering if maybe Noah was right and he should come clean, that maybe Ronan deserved to know that Adam was a liar and a cheat, and that he probably wasn’t the best decision Ronan had ever made for his band.


	14. Untouchable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Adam spends New Year's Eve with the Lynch family.

Adam hoped not to see any more of his friends after he saw Noah. The conversation jarred him and he couldn’t think about anything except that stupid video. He nearly missed the stop getting home, and that would have been a disaster because the bus stop after was at least two miles from the trailer park and he was slowly losing feeling of his ears and nose from the cold. When he finally got home, his bedroom held little comfort for his shaking hands. There was a roaring in his ears as his mind cruelly replayed the video of him in the scrapyard, singing off key, out of tune, singing nevertheless for a different band. One that his friends hated. One that his friends warned him, over and over, about, to let alone but he couldn’t. He felt like puking as he remembered Noah’s words _Stop playing with him_.

He wasn’t playing. It was just one song. One fucking song. He _wrote_ that song. He had a right to sing it. He had a right to play it, even if he played with a different band. His friends didn’t own him. His band didn’t own him.

Fuck, their band didn’t even have a name for him to belong to.

He hunched miserably in his bed, ignoring his mother when she told him there were cold leftovers of the cheap microwave ravioli she had had for dinner and Adam could finish it if he wanted. He didn’t hear when his father stomped into the doublewide, the loud sound of the television flickering on to the evening news about fireworks at the fairground on New Year’s Eve, of his old man complaining about the fancy displays and drunken revelry held by the overly rich Aglionby sorts at the fairground every holiday, while the people of the dirt, the people Adam came from hunkered back in their dusty, forgotten corner of Henrietta, in that part of town where the snow never touched them, where it was just gray and cold and damp and miserable.

New Year’s Eve was tomorrow, and Adam already knew that even for the people in the dust, the people in the trailer park, there would be drinking. There would be cheap fireworks to entertain their own. Adam’s dad would probably be drunk out of his mind before the real fireworks in the fairgrounds started, so he would have to make himself scarce if he didn’t want a Happy-New-Year-little-fucker bruise.

But at the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to care. At the moment, all he saw was the endless wash of white halogen lamps bleeding at the edges of his vision. He saw monstrous amps mounted on scrap metal, the shadow of a double-headed axe and the curved silhouette of Kavinsky’s body as he ground the tune out of the steel strings. He heard Noah’s voice, cold and disembodied, talking over and over, over the endless din of the music, _Stop playing with Ronan. You’re playing with fire. Ronan does_ not _appreciate liars, Adam._

And over it all, like a thief stealing into the night, infiltrating feverish dreams of scrap metal, guitar riffs, and angry, gray-gold eyes, he saw that fateful night at Monmouth. The one he was never a part of. The one he could never forget.

_I drip it onto you._

Noah and Ronan kissed in his mind’s eye over and over and over.

 

 

He woke at dawn, a strange mixture of guilt, shame and something else hooked in the dry tightness of his throat. He was dirty: he had not changed out of the clothes he wore to work the previous night and the cottony feeling in his mouth was due to not having brushed his teeth before he drifted to sleep. He moved lethargically, as if he was in an aquarium filled with viscous liquid as opposed to water.

His limbs felt leaden, but his pulse pounded erratically at his neck and temples as he reached the tiny, pathetic bathroom and stripped. It was even colder in here than it was in his shitty bedroom. At least he had blankets to throw over his freezing extremities in the bedroom. Standing naked in the bathroom, he felt raw and exposed. The icy feeling of the tiles on his bare feet sent a jolt of unwelcome electricity up his spine. His skin felt like it shriveled on itself as he reached for the knob of the shower. He didn’t know if they would have hot water, but he needed the shower to feel human again. Right now, he felt like even the cold could not drown out the guilt in his throat.

There was hot water running for a merciful five minutes, just long enough for him to wash off the grime from working at the factory, the convenience store, the auto shop. He scrubbed at his hands, at the imaginary streaks of grease down his arms and willed himself to feel clean before toweling down and stepping back into his room, and changing for his next job. There was still work even though it was New Year’s Eve, and that, at least, maintained a small semblance of normalcy in the rollercoaster that was winter break.

He had stopped hearing Kavinsky’s song in his ears some time between the shower and getting dressed. His father was passed out on his recliner. There were beer cans lined up on the floor next to where he slept. Adam tiptoed quietly to the kitchen. There was no food. His mom and given the remnants of the microwave ravioli to his dad when Adam had not gotten up for dinner the previous night. He would have to find food elsewhere, and he needed to find some soon. His stomach grumbled at the lack of sustenance for the past eighteen hours. His last meal had been in the morning of the previous day.

 

It was still two hours before his auto shop shift, the only one for the day, would start and Adam debated if he wanted to just leave early and hang around there, look for food he could afford at some nearby gas station minimart. The telephone rang.

Adam winced, his eyes darting to where his dad was snoring on the recliner in the living room. Robert Parrish grunted in his sleep. Adam pounced on the receiver before it rang again.

It was Gansey.

Adam moved further into the kitchen so his father wouldn’t hear him.

“Hey,” Gansey greeted brightly, as if he was not calling Adam’s house at 4 a.m. “Blue told me she talked to you.”

“Oh,” Adam said softly. The fingers of his left hand, the one not holding the phone receiver, tangled in the cords. “Yeah, yeah she did.” He breathed a sigh of relief. Talking to Gansey eased some of the anxiety he felt over that unsettling conversation he had with Noah. Talking about Blue and Gansey’s relationship, because it had nothing to do with Adam, made him feel infinitely better, like he wasn’t about to explode with fear or panic or nerves.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about it,” he scolded Gansey. He knew his voice sounded casual, there was no bite to his words. Gansey wouldn’t know that this call almost made Adam feel normal. He leaned against the kitchen counter feeling like his legs might not support him, from the wave of relief he felt after an entire night of wallowing in guilt, shame and fear.

Gansey’s voice was sheepish on the other line. Adam almost smiled as he imagined his friend scratching the back of his head and looking embarrassed. “I didn’t know how you would take it. I mean, I know you and Blue, um.” He trailed off and didn’t finish, and now Adam did laugh, a light sound that bubbled out of his dry throat.

“It’s okay. Blue and I.” He smiled inwardly. Yes, Blue and he. “We’re okay, I think. You don’t have to be sorry for anything.”

The relief in Gansey’s voice was almost palpable, and Adam wondered if this was how he sounded when he first answered the phone and heard Gansey’s voice on the other line. “Thank God. I’m really sorry, I don’t know how to not be weird about it.” He laughed nervously.

Adam smiled. Gansey could probably never weird him out if he tried. He was as vanilla as they come. He let Gansey muddle through another half-apology, half-ramble about Blue, before he finally took pity and assured him that it was all right, there was really nothing else left between Adam and Blue and he needn’t feel awkward about dating his ex. Adam didn’t want to say that he had other things he needed to worry about (like whether Noah told Ronan about the video, even though he said he wouldn’t but Adam’s stomach lurched at the thought he might, and then Ronan would stop looking at him, he’d stop being friends with him, stop sharing his music with him, all because Adam couldn’t shut the fuck up and keep away from Kavinsky’s band, and oh God, what if they never talk again? What if Ronan told his other friends that Adam was playing for the competition? What if Ronan and Noah kissed again? Even though Noah said Ronan did not like him… what if? What if?)

His hands were shaking again when Gansey finally ended the call with an embarrassed apology at having called Adam up in the early hours of dawn. They wished each other a happy New Year and Adam had to force his hands to cooperate before he could replace the receiver. He stood in the kitchen, leaning heavily on the counter, taking quick, quiet breaths to calm his nerves. He needed to stop thinking about this video. If Noah had shown it to Ronan or Gansey, Gansey would have told him in the call. Ronan would have torn down the trailer park to rattle Adam’s teeth for betraying them.

_It’s just one song, Adam. Your friends will not kill you over one song._

It was a full half hour before he could stand straight again, and push off the counter. His dad was still asleep. His mom would probably be waking soon. His hunger had passed and now he just felt dead. He had to be in the auto shop in forty-five minutes.

Adam sighed, and put on his shoes. He had to get to work. Otherwise, he would just keep repeating the same shame spiral over and over.

 

 

It was when he was about to clock off the auto shop at noon when Ronan showed up with a complicated look on his face. Although Adam had hoped he would not have to see any of his friends for the rest of the break, both because he dreaded what they would say if they found out about the video, and also because he wanted some time to think through his issues, so he could approach the chaos he created without feeling like puking or exploding in some manner. He knew he was a mess and he didn’t want to have other people see him fall apart until he was ready to pick up all of his broken pieces and put himself back up again. Logically though, that was next to impossible with both Blue and Ronan still in Henrietta, and Noah had already proven he was not beyond flying back out to Virginia if he needed to.

Adam dreaded what the look on Ronan’s face meant as he strolled into the shop, knocking his knuckles on the steel frame of the garage door to announce his presence. Adam was still bent over the hood of a silver Ford Focus with car battery problems. It was an easy fix, the customer had just come in at the last minute. He’d gotten a jump start from a passing good Samaritan and made it to the auto shop to get the battery replaced, but Adam’s fingers weren’t cooperating to fit the battery into the car. The cold felt like it had frozen all his joints in place.

Ronan’s presence at the door didn’t help.

“I thought you were off by noon,” he said when Adam did not say anything and merely turned back to his work. He stood, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, looking at Adam with glittering eyes that brimmed to say something Adam could not quite bring himself to understand. He was wearing the jacket Adam had returned to Noah.

Adam shut his eyes.

Fuck. Ronan looked good.

His eyes flew open. Now there was a thought he had never allowed himself to think before. Ronan did not look any different than he did when he and Adam had driven to Richmond to see Ronan’s mother, that is to say he still looked so very stereotypically Ronan, with his expensive jacket, the charcoal sweatshirt he wore inside his jacket, the gloves that cost three months of Adam’s wages from all three jobs, the artfully torn black designer jeans that allowed a peek of black thermal underwear instead of bare skin. Adam felt acutely aware of how grease-streaked and dirt-covered he looked next to Ronan. He was awkward, dirty, covered in and smelled like gasoline, and worst of all, he felt cold. It was a miserable existence. Adam did not know what changed, only that something had.

He flexed his fingers instinctively and then rubbed his hands to generate some heat. It felt like he was getting frostbitten and it wasn’t even that cold. It had certainly stopped snowing already and the slush outside had melted into rainbow puddles of brackish water mixed with motor oil and gasoline. Once his hands started cooperating, he made short work of the battery replacement, and then moved to the driver’s side where the owner was waiting to test. He gestured for him to start the car. The Ford revved to life.

Adam sighed and moved towards a table in the back to get a rag to clean his hands. Ronan was still standing at the entrance to the shop, looking at him expectantly.

“This is the last one,” he said finally, rubbing the tender skin between his fingers for any remnants of diesel hidden in the tiny cracks of his skin. “I just gotta ring this up inside.”

Ronan snorted but didn’t move from where he stood. “I’ll wait.”

When he came back, Ronan was perched on the hood of an old truck left in the garage for extensive repairs. Adam had worked on it some, but Boyd had not wanted the truck fixed until its owner paid a downpayment for the parts that needed replacement, and so the truck was left in the garage for days without anyone lifting a finger to fix it. Ronan sat on the hood with his feet up and Adam worried that he might dent the metal and the repairs would be taken out of his pay.

 

Ronan jumped off the truck as Adam pulled down the zip of his coveralls, then stopped and thought about what he was doing. Ronan still had the same complicated look on his face, but his eyes were training on Adam’s hand, pushing the zipper of the coverall back up to his neck.

“What’re you doing here?”

Ronan grinned at him. “Picking you up.”

“Oh,” he said, quirking his eyebrow and making for his backpack. He had cleaned up most of the car grease on his face, neck and hands, but he would need to get changed if Ronan intended for them to go anywhere. Adam didn’t think he would want to be with him anywhere public with Adam looking like he had been rolling in diesel and motor oil. “Where are we going?”

“Home,” Ronan said. “The Barns.”

Adam had to suppress the gasp of surprise that threatened to bubble through his breath. He didn’t think the Lynch brothers would be going back home any more, not after, as Ronan explained, their mother’s waking up being classified as a false alarm. But it seemed she had been taken out of suicide watch and allowed to go home to spend the rest of the holidays with her children.

Ronan was inviting Adam to spend the holidays with them.

Adam swallowed and shoved his hands that had curled into fists into the pockets of his coveralls. His fingers had started to shake. “Let me get changed.”

  
 

Adam at the Barns felt like an out-of-body experience. Bringing Adam home with him had been a last minute decision. Declan had called the previous morning: their mother could be released back into their custody after an uneventful week of observation. Ronan was spurred to action. Aurora being released back to the real world meant two things: that the Lynch brothers would be coming home after months of exile from their father’s house, and that Ronan would have to spend the holiday in close quarters with Declan and his snide comments about Ronan’s inheritance. He could feel the itch of a fight brewing in the pit of the stomach with the news.

Since Niall Lynch’s death, him and Declan under the same roof meant black eyes, split eyebrows and broken noses as the elder Lynch brothers duked it out for supremacy over Niall Lynch’s dominion. It was not a trifling thing to fight over: the Barns was a sprawling estate, acres of forest and farm land dotted with the namesake barns and farmhouses, sheds, coops and animal nurseries. It was valued in millions, perhaps dozens of millions, Ronan did not know the exact extent of his father’s fortune, and all willed to the middle child, a fact Declan, the eldest, could never come to terms with as he had more than once astutely pointed out that Ronan did not understand anything about the maintenance of the property and its business. Hell, he didn’t even know the boundaries of the entire estate.

Declan never failed to remind Ronan that he had worked to ensure the Barns would be cared for in their self-imposed exile, that animals would be fed, that electricity would be maintained, that running water would be available, while his two brothers moved to the Aglionby dorms (and Ronan to Monmouth) to finish their high school education. The Barns was kept in a trust as part of Ronan’s inheritance upon his eighteenth birthday. The catch was that he needed to finish school. For a time, Declan had been almost triumphant that Ronan would utterly fail when Ronan completely broke down and drank and raced his waking hours away in the immediate aftermath of Niall’s death, if Ronan hadn’t attempted to kill himself. That had been a sobering moment for both brothers to set aside their animosity in favor of a tense truce in which inheritance was never discussed. Ronan and Declan mostly stayed out of each other’s way and policed their borders vigilantly: Declan in the Aglionby dorms and his put upon demeanor over caring for their mother, Ronan in Monmouth, carrying the scars of his grief in his hands and arms. That meant, of course, that any other potential source of tension could erupt to destroy the uneasy peace.

Aurora’s homecoming on New Year’s Eve was the grenade to their armistice. By the terms of Niall’s will, neither Lynch brother actually owned the Barns just yet: Ronan was not eighteen and had not finished high school, and Declan was not the explicit recipient. But at the moment, this was Declan’s turf: he had been the one ensuring that the property would continue to be managed in their absence. He had been the one ensuring that Aurora Lynch had received care during her illness. Matthew’s presence would have been the deciding factor of maintaining the truce, but then Ronan heard that Ashley, Declan’s vacuous flavor-of-the-month girlfriend, was going to be there with them on New Year’s Eve. Ronan did not think he was capable of being civil given his knowledge of his brother’s indiscretions to his girlfriend.

And so he brought Adam.

He didn’t quite know what had spurred the decision to drive to the garage in the mid-morning instead of accompanying his brothers to Richmond to pick up their mother. Maybe it had been Matthew’s warning that Declan would probably stop over the next town to pick up Ashley from her parents’ suburban mansion. Maybe it was just the thought of being stuck in an enclosed space for two and a half hours, listening to Declan and his holier-than-thou speech about Ronan’s irresponsibility.

Ronan dared to cast a sideways glance at Adam as they alighted the BMW. He had parked in the sloped driveway, blocking access to any other vehicle. Declan’s Volvo was nowhere in sight. In the meager sunlight of the cold wintry afternoon, Adam’s dirt blond hair glistened pale gold, a stark contrast to the lightening tan in his face. His cheeks were flushed from the cold, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, likely because he was wearing his shitty fingerless gloves again, the ones that barely kept his beautiful spindly fingers warm. His blue eyes were almost gray as he stared in wide-eyed wonder at the breathless, expansive beauty of Ronan’s childhood home.

Maybe, Ronan decided, it was the freckles. They hadn’t gone anywhere even in the winter, though Adam’s tan had considerably lightened, and Ronan’s fingers itched to trace the myriad constellations of sun-kissed stars on the back of Adam’s neck, where his hairline ended. The freckles disappeared in a spray of warmth on Adam’s skin, into the neck of the three layers of sweaters he wore. He squinted as the slanting rays of sunlight glinted off one of the windows of the main house and dazzled his eyes, and he shivered in the cool breeze. Here in Singer’s Falls, the snow had not yet melted and there were pockets of slush they had to navigate through to get to the front door. Ronan fished into his pockets for his keys as Adam hunkered miserably next to the doorframe, too embarrassed to crowd Ronan, but too cold to stray too far from Ronan’s body heat. When the main door swung open and the warmth from the heated living room greeted them, Adam breathed a sigh of relief.

Ronan left his keys on the side table in the doorway. There were sounds from the living room that told him Declan had probably already been here, maybe left Matthew and Aurora to go pick up his girlfriend alone. He motioned for Adam to follow him inside before Adam died of frostbite.

“Hey, pal!” Matthew greeted from the living room. He was sprawled on the couch, draped with a cable-knit afghan to keep even warmer, as he flipped channels on the wide screen television. “Hey, Adam! I didn’t know Ronan would be bringing you here. Are you joining us for New Year Eve dinner? Mom said she’s cooking!” Matthew’s smile to Adam was warm and friendly.

Adam gave an awkward nod, the corners of his severe lips turning up minutely. “I didn’t know I was going to be here until Ronan showed up at my work.” He shrugged and glanced askance at Ronan, who waved him off to join Matthew on the couch.

That smile wreaked havoc on Ronan’s stomach. His head had been buzzing the entire drive to Singer’s Falls at his decision to bring Adam Parrish to his home. Now seeing Adam standing diffidently in their house, his eyes wide at the quiet, homely grandeur of the Barns, Ronan could not imagine how he had second-guessed himself. He knew Adam needed to be here as well, even though Adam himself probably did not know it yet. There was an undeniable rightness that he felt, looking at the other boy try to take in everything that constituted Ronan’s childhood without going slack-jawed. Adam belonged here, in the quiet warmth of the Lynch family room, just as much as Matthew, who had settled back into the couch content with being at home at last.

“Hey kid, get Parrish one of those scarf things you’re wearing so his ears don’t fall off,” was what he said instead, turning from Adam to Matthew to grab the remote control and set the TV firmly to the Animal Planet channel. Matthew gave a muted sort of delighted noise as the screen shifted to show baby seals swimming in the Antarctic. “I’m just going to check up on Mom. Parrish, there’s TV with Matthew or you can probably do whatever. House’s free for exploration.”

Adam looked between Ronan’s retreating form and the thick, warm afghan that Matthew had pressed to his chest, and decidedly collapsed on the couch, curling in on himself under the thick fabric. When Ronan next slipped back into the living room five minutes later to check on his brother and his guest, Adam had fallen asleep to the sound of baby seals on the TV.

Adam woke in the late afternoon feeling distinctly embarrassed at having fallen asleep in another person’s house. He swiped at his chin with the rough fabric of his gloves, half-afraid that he may have drooled on the borrowed afghan wrapped around his neck and arms. His face was mercifully dry, though there were sleep-induced tears pooling at the corner of his left eye, the side he had pressed against the back of the couch. The living room was empty but it was still warm enough that Adam no longer needed the afghan and could pull off his gloves and stuff it into his pockets. The TV was still on, at the same channel Ronan had left it before Adam fell asleep, but the sound was on mute. He fished for the remote control on the corner of the couch where Matthew had been sitting and shut it off.

The house was silent, as if all of the occupants had just up and ran off, even though Adam knew they had all just come home today. He felt awkward and alone, too embarrassed to look around and explore without his host, even though Ronan had told him that he was free to look around. Adam had never been to a house as large as the Lynch family home, though he was certain, this paled in comparison to the Gansey mansion up in DC, or even the Czerny estate in Long Island. Adam had seen pictures of both Gansey and Noah in their fancy family homes and those were nothing like the Barns.

It was certainly nothing like he pictured a rich person’s home should be: there were no shiny, marble end tables or display cabinets of expensive glass sculptures like what most normal rich people obsessed on. Everything in the Barns was functional. The L-shaped couch on which he had slept was worn with use, the burgundy leather had a gorgeous patina that made the expensive couch that Gansey had put in the middle of Monmouth look crass and impersonal. There were fur throws and small square pillows, all smelling of the same warm scent of woodsmoke and lemon cleaner that seemed to permeate the entire living room. Adam guessed this must be what the entire house smelled like if even the walls gave off the same scent. The low table just below where the TV was wall-mounted housed framed photos of the Lynch family from a previous lifetime: here was one of Declan from when he was maybe fifteen or sixteen, wearing a funny-looking green kilt, the photo probably taken on St. Patrick’s Day. Here was another, with him and Ronan, wearing matching costumes and carrying what looked like bagpipes. Ronan wore a smile so unlike the sharp-edged knife-like grin Adam had often seen on him that for a while, he thought the long-haired teenager in the photo was another boy. There was one with Matthew and Aurora, golden-haired and beautiful, so unlike the other two brothers, who looked so much like their father, Adam had difficulty identifying which was which in another photo with Niall, Declan and Ronan. In all of them, he saw a life so much different from his own: Ronan had been happy, surrounded by a beautiful family that loved him and that he loved in return. Adam wondered at the horror Niall’s death must have wreaked on the surviving members of his family. He remembered it in the furrow of Declan’s brow whenever he passed him in the halls of Aglionby, in Matthew’s smile, dampened with the months of trying to keep the peace between his brothers, in the steely glint of Ronan’s unflinching gaze, the careworn look in Aurora’s eyes when Adam had seen her in the assisted living facility. There was no bringing back the smiling faces in the old photographs. But it was nice to see that once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had not been the strange, angry boy that Adam had come to know.

He set the frame he had picked up back on the mantelpiece. It was the largest frame, of the family together, probably two or three years ago, when Ronan was thirteen, at the cusp of manhood. Like Declan and Niall in the photo, Ronan was sharp, handsome, commanded attention with just his smile. He looked like he hadn’t had his growth spurt yet though, he and Matthew looked about the same height, and Matthew was three years younger. Adam remembered when he was thirteen, he still hadn’t grown into his ears. His dad had always told him he was an ugly little shit from the day he was born.

Adam believed him too.

“Stop smiling at my hair, I look like an idiot.”

He didn’t realize that he had been smiling, but the tug at his lips widened now into a wicked grin as Ronan stalked over from the kitchen to join him, looking at the pictures.

“You look like a girl here,” Adam snickered, pointing at a small photo of Ronan in his middle school uniform, posing for what looked like a school event.

Ronan snorted and snatched the frame away to study it. “Fucking side parts don’t work on curly hair. Also, I was twelve, Parrish. Don’t remember you looking too hot in that video the maggot posted on Youtube. Weren’t you thirteen in that?”

Adam dropped his hands and stopped smiling, suddenly reminded of Noah and the video. The one that Blue had taken was a distant memory that came up only after a brief silence during which Ronan had set down the photo and turned to look at him. He averted his eyes and stared at the row of pictures instead.

“Oh, uh, yeah, that,” he said softly. Faintly, he could hear his blood beginning to rush in his ears, the beginning of a panic attack. He willed the memory of Noah and that video in the scrapyard down, forced himself to concentrate on the here and now. “Yeah, oh my God, yeah I looked awful in that video.” He cheeks colored at the memory of his messy, crookedly cut hair, his over-the-top freckles, the squeaky voice of pre-pubescence. He had been a late bloomer and at thirteen, he hadn’t quite filled out his voice yet. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you saw that.”

Ronan smirked. “Noah found it. And it’s just as well, we probably wouldn’t know your loser ass existed if it hadn’t been for that.”

Adam nodded, still remembering how Blue had laughed at his performance of Bent, and told him she was going to post it for the world to discover his talent. Maybe in the end, he did get discovered. Probably, if it weren’t for Blue taking and posting the video, and Noah trawling Youtube and seeing it, he wouldn’t have the friends he had now. It was ironic that the same actions could completely undo all that with the scrapyard video.

He turned the attention back to the photos, lingering on the one of Ronan with Niall’s electric guitar. It was a Gibson Les Paul, vintage 1959 classic. Precise replica of Rick Neilsen’s electric guitar. Adam imagined it may have even been signed. It was no surprise that Niall Lynch had owned one, or that he let his fifteen-year-old son draw corvids on the guitar’s smooth body using black Sharpie ink. The guitar cost a small fortune, probably equivalent to a year’s worth of wages at the auto shop. Adam was supremely jealous.

“Do you still have this?” he asked wonderingly, holding up the photo of Ronan rocking out the guitar, with his long hair tied messily. His thumb strayed on the glass cover of the frame, as if he meant to touch the guitar in reverence, and then over Ronan’s face in the picture, his hair.

Ronan’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, suppose so. It was dad’s favorite. And then I drew on it and he grounded me for two weeks.” He grinned. “I could try to find it. Probably lying somewhere in the attic.”

Before Adam could say anything else, Ronan bounded off to the doorway leading up to the bedroom and the attic. Adam was torn between putting the photo down and following Ronan and standing rooted in his spot. He didn’t think it would be polite to just barge up to their bedrooms without invitation. That was personal space.

He didn’t have to make the decision to follow though as Aurora had entered the living room just then, shaking her head at the mess that Matthew left on the couch, with the pillows haphazardly thrown, his afghan, crumpled and abandoned on one of the couch arms. Adam still had his wrapped around his shoulders even though the living room was warm enough to shed both the afghan and at least two of his sweaters. She smiled when she saw him looking at the pictures, and he had to avert his eyes as he smiled back his greeting. Aurora Lynch’s beauty in the assisted living facility was muted, like looking at a sleeping princess away from her kingdom. Here in the Barns, she was queen and the majesty of her smile was undeniable. Adam thought he saw a trace of that searing beauty every time Ronan’s eyes glinted at him.

“Adam,” she said warmly, and then Adam, who had never ever considered that something like Aurora Lynch would be hugging him as a mother would hug her son, drew him into her arms, the same warmth in her voice, Adam found in her arms.

He froze for a moment, unsure of how to react. He had never been hugged like this before—Blue did not count, she had been his girlfriend, and then his friend and it was different. Even when he was very young, Adam had very seldom experienced any warmth from the way his parents had raised him. From the get-go, he was always the unwanted the child, the child who put a cramp in his father’s lifestyle, the child who his mother had never expected to bring into existence. Even when his father hadn’t been hitting him, there had never been any affection. His mother had never looked at him with anything warmer than indifference. He had learned to stop looking for it. Adam Parrish, his parents’ cold demeanor said, was not a thing to be loved. To very suddenly be confronted with the warmth and familial affection, even in the form of casual greeting made his eyes sting with the shine of tears and a lump catch in his throat.

Awkwardly, he brought his hand up to tentatively hug back, and then Aurora Lynch was moving away. Adam blinked rapidly with his eyes lowered so she wouldn’t see how affected he was with the casual way with which she gave away her affection. “Ma’am,” he said softly, his accent slipping as the lump finally escaped his throat and allowed him to talk.

Aurora smiled kindly and took the frame that was in Adam’s hand. Her fingers brushed the picture lovingly. “I didn’t quite expect he would grow up the way he has,” she said absently, looking down at the picture of fifteen-year-old Ronan smiling up at the camera, holding an Xbox controller. Behind him, a younger Gansey and Noah held similar controllers on one hand, and a glass of cold soda in another. It was the picture of glorious youth in Virginia summertime. “I always thought he would turn out a bit more like his friends. Maybe, like Matthew. But he’s too much like his father.”

Adam blinked at the pictures. Yes, he could see exactly what she meant in more than the way that Niall and Ronan’s long hair curled in the photos, more than the way their thin smiles mirrored mischief and mayhem, unlike Declan’s generally more serious demeanor. Ronan was clearly his father’s son, down to the sharp gleam in their eyes.

Aurora’s smile became wistful, sad. “Maybe he would have turned out better if I had been around when their father…” she trailed off and didn’t continue.

Adam took the photo back from her trembling hands. “I think Ronan is much better now than he’s been in a while,” he ventured softly, remembering back to the fractured, damaged boy he had met in the hospital parking lot. It had been a scant four months since. Ronan felt like a different person then.

“Yes,” she agreed, and the relief in her smile reflected in the crinkle in her eyes. “I’m glad he has friends like you. I don’t think he would have made it without you.” Adam didn’t think so, but he didn’t voice disagreement as Aurora continued. “He talks a lot about you, Adam. I don’t remember Ronan had anything much to say about anyone else whenever he visited me.”

Adam remembered what she said when they had visited her and he had seen Ronan sing to her and ask her how he could help him. He was too embarrassed to bring up the fact that Ronan probably talked about him a lot because he was the resident charity case of their group, and there probably wasn’t much to talk about Gansey and Noah since they weren’t begging for companionship like he was.

“You’re his favorite singer.” The smile turned teasing as she looked at him color and then try to stammer a denial of his vocal skills. “His dad used to be his favorite singer. And now it’s you.”

He was saved from having to reply when Ronan stomped back into the living room, Gibson Les Paul slung over his shoulder with a black leather strap. He glowered reproachfully at his mother.

“Mom, don’t ruin my street cred with Parrish. He still thinks I’m the shit.”

Adam felt a laugh bubbling in his throat. Yes, he did. Ronan was certainly the shit. Of course, Adam didn’t have to admit this to anyone but himself. “I don’t think anyone would consider you the shit, though. You suck at school.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re a nerd, Parrish. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the guitar god and all you nerds at Aglionby wanna a piece of my ridiculously awesome ass.”

Adam didn’t think Ronan meant it in the way Adam thought but he didn’t deny that either.

Aurora laughed as she moved back to the kitchen to let the two boys play with the guitar Ronan had procured. “Dinner will be ready in a few, once Declan and Ashley come back.” Ronan made a face at what he thought of that. “Ronan, set the table in a while, would you? And wake Matthew when you’re done. I’ll check on the food.”

Dinner, Adam thought, was even better than the beautiful house, the photos, or the companionship. He helped Ronan set the table as Aurora requested, and then Ronan went to find Matthew in his bedroom, and Adam went to find Declan and his girlfriend outside, where they had been walking. He awkwardly had to clear his throat to announce his presence because they were making out against Declan’s Volvo, and Ashley made a joke over how red Adam’s ears were as the three of them walked back inside, to the homely smell of grilled lamb, turkey and buttered vegetables that didn’t look like it should be in season but smelled delicious anyway.

Adam sat next to Ronan and Matthew, across from Declan and Ashley. Aurora sat at the head of the table, once again, queen of her domain. There was polite table talk between Aurora and Ashley as she asked about the private girls school Ashley attended, and what she and Declan were planning for college. There was Matthew sneaking an extra glass of wine, which Ronan calmly intercepted and then poured for himself and Adam instead. Adam had never drunk wine in his life, but he wrinkled his nose and held his breath when he sipped to taste. Ronan and Declan laughed at the absurd expression on his face when he decided that red wine did not agree with his palate, and Matthew eventually filched his glass, telling him that this was the one time they were all allowed to drink even though they were underage and how could Adam just waste good wine like that. Ronan pointed out that beer was a better drink that would go well with grilled lamb, and Aurora told him that the smell of his breath would repel everyone within a five foot radius if he so much as touched his father’s Guinness. Adam ventured that he didn’t think it was that bad if Ronan would just brush his teeth after, and Matthew, Declan and Ashley had exchanged funny looks and burst out laughing when Ronan blushed so hard, Adam thought his neck would explode.

It was a fairy tale evening that he never thought he would experience. The Lynch brothers’ animosity was suspended for one night as they enjoyed the sumptuous meal Aurora prepared. Adam enjoyed most of all as he had never eaten so much good food in his life, not even that one time when Gansey had accidentally ordered five pizzas at Nino’s and the five of them, Blue included, were forced to gorge down the food because Gansey did not appreciate wastage and Adam had agreed but had felt like puking afterwards from eating so much pizza grease.

When they finished, Declan and Ashley eventually drifted from the table to Declan’s bedroom, to continue the make-out session Adam had interrupted. Matthew was smiling and fuzzy-looking, having drunk so much wine. Ronan assured his mother that he and Matthew would clean up, so she could retire to rest. The day had been full of excitement for her, and none of the brothers wanted their mother to over-exert herself on her first day of self-sufficiency.

Matthew was too buzzed to help, so Adam helped wash the dishes as Ronan put out the leftovers back into their the oven or wrapped in cling-wrap and shut into the fridge for reheating the next day. By the time they were done, it was 10PM and Adam would have to go home soon. He didn’t want to leave. The Barns was magical at night, and even though Adam had not had any of the wine to drink, he felt as fuzzy around the edges as Matthew had looked before he had gone to bed to sleep off his buzz. Ronan suggested they look out for the fireworks outside.

The fairground, where the New Year fireworks display in Henrietta usually took place was a good distance from Singer’s Falls, but once they climbed up the roof of one of the smaller barns that dotted the property, they were able to see the wide expanse of the winter night sky, and out in the horizon, the fireworks bloomed like transient glittering flowers before winking out of existence. It felt a little bit like magic as he watched but did not hear the boom of the explosions in the sky.

He hugged the afghan around his shoulders. With his stomach full of good food, his mind’s eye still on the photos in the Lynch family mantelpiece, his vision trained on the succession of fireworks that he had never bothered to watch before, in the years he spent New Year Eve alone, in the shitty bedroom of the doublewide, Adam Parrish felt content.

Beside him, Ronan stirred. He’d brought the Gibson out with them and had been fiddling with it as they watched the firework display. Just now, he strummed absently. It looked like his mind was somewhere else, but his eyes were trained on the wonder in Adam’s face.

“Hey,” he said suddenly, and the strums became more purposeful, resolved into a tune. Adam smiled, he knew this. He had almost forgotten about it, with all of the practices they’d done, all of the covers they mastered, and the beautiful new song Ronan had written. He forgot the one that he did.

He began to sing.

_'Cause what I don't understand_   
_Is why I'm feeling so bad now_   
_When I know it was my idea_   
_I could've just denied all the truth and lied  
And why am I the only one standing stranded on the same ground_

_When all else fails_   
_Would you be there to love me?_   
_If all else fails  
Would you be brave to see right through me?_

He hadn't realized he had closed his eyes when he sang. The air was cold, but Adam felt so warm. When he stopped singing and opened his eyes, Ronan’s face was mere inches from his. His eyes, a stormy blue in the gloom, held the same complicated expression Adam had seen when he had shown up that afternoon at the garage. It was a fortuitous turn of events, Adam decided. He was not going to waste it.

With a quiet breath that may have been as sigh, Adam closed his eyes and then closed the distance between them. Ronan met him halfway and even though Adam knew what he had meant to do all along, he was surprised still at the feel of warm lips moving against his. Adam’s mind for a brief sadistic moment, flashed back to the scene at Monmouth when he had seen Ronan kiss Noah, the image died a sputtering death at the gentle feel of Ronan’s lips.

When they pulled apart, Ronan’s eyes were also closed, and there was a vague expression of wonder in his face, like he couldn’t believe this was happening, like he couldn’t believe Adam would kiss him back, so Adam kissed him again.

And then again, and again, until it felt strange to still be clutching at the fabric of the afghan around him, until Ronan almost fell over holding the guitar between them, until they were both breathless and gasping, cheeks blazing and mouths red. Ronan put away the guitar and cupped his face with one hand, and his other hand pulled Adam at the back of his neck and kissed him again, smiling against his lips that Adam thought was a vague yes to a question he did not know he had been asking.

It was the most magical night of Adam’s life.

* * *

 

It was 11:30 by the time Ronan pulled up in front of the doublewide.

It was almost too easy to get carried away, lying on the roof in the Barns, holding on to  each other at the thrill of each kiss. When Adam had finally sighed and whispered that he needed to get home, Ronan had reluctantly pulled away and jumped down from the roof. Adam handed him the guitar, and then jumped off as well, Ronan bracing his arm when he nearly lost his footing, the two of them laughing as they walked back to the house. Both Aurora and Matthew had already retired to sleep, but Declan and Ashley were still in the living room watching TV. They had looked at him funny when Adam thanked them quietly, folded the afghan and set it on the couch before following Ronan out back to the driveway.

The drive was short and they rode in silence. Ronan’s hand was on the gearshift, and Adam’s was on his, and they blushed the entire time like thirteen-year-olds experiencing their first kiss.

They kissed again before Adam finally had to leave, and it was different from the quiet kisses at the Barns, because Adam let his mouth hang open and Ronan took it as an invitation to try to eat him inside out. When they parted, it wasn’t from the urgency for Adam to get into the house or get beaten up, but more from the fact that both of them needed air.

“Oh yeah,” Ronan said breathlessly, and reached into his back pocket. He pressed a folded envelope into Adam’s hand. “Memorize it. We’ll play it some time.”

Adam recognized the cheap note paper he had used to write the lyrics of the song, and he smiled again, and then with a final kiss, he stepped out of the car and slipped quietly into the trailer. The living room was empty and smelled faintly like cigarettes and cheap beer. The door to his parents’ room was ajar and it was empty. Probably, they had gone to some gathering with the other trailer park neighbors to set off their own fireworks somewhere in the dust. Adam didn’t care.

He lay in his bed for a long while, replaying the feel of Ronan’s lips on his over and over, smiling stupidly to himself as he remembered the gentle hand that cupped his face, the fingers that twined with his as they held hands in the car. When he could no longer keep his eyes open, he got up and was about to brush his teeth and change into pajamas when he remembered the envelope. He pulled out the paper and smiled again at the words, his words, breathing life to Ronan’s music. They would play his song soon.

There was another piece of paper folded inside the envelope and Adam thought maybe Ronan had forgotten he had left it there, and might need it so he could return it when they went back to school. But it was just a flyer, an advertisement taken out by St. Agnes Catholic Church, to rent out the rooms above the offices. Adam turned the flyer over to see if there was anything written on the back, maybe Ronan had used the ad as a scratch to write music but there was nothing else on it.

Shrugging, he folded it back into the envelope, with the song lyrics, and stuffed it inside the covers of his pillow, and went about to get ready to sleep. He knew it was probably too good to last but he wished, just before he finally drifted off, that the magic would never end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so, that finally happened.
> 
> The bits of song in this chapter is still from _Same Ground_ , by Kitchie Nadal.


	15. Red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one with the sex. There's always one in fanfics like these.

Adam was not sure what, if anything, he expected to change when he kissed Ronan Lynch. He didn’t feel at all different when he woke in the morning, brushed his teeth and splashed his face with cold water, before changing for work. It felt like everything that happened the previous day had been a happy daydream that he was slowly, miserably waking from, but when he stepped out of the double wide to take his bike, Ronan’s car was parked on the side of the road, waiting for him like it was the most normal thing in the world. Adam didn’t know whether to feel giddy or to feel cross. He wasn’t a damsel in distress, and he didn’t need to be driven to his job, but the butterflies in his stomach had invaded his throat.

He settled for annoyed, because what was Adam Parrish if not someone who made everything difficult and miserable like himself?

Ronan sat inside the idling car, still in yesterday’s clothing because he was disgusting, with his hands to the vent, casually heating up his fingers as he waiting for Adam, as if it really was the most normal thing in the world. When Adam hurled himself on the passenger seat, schooling his features into the mask of annoyance he had settled on, Ronan didn’t waste a moment and was on him, all hot fingers and hungry lips. Adam could scarcely breathe as the events from the previous night came crashing back to him.

It was morning and Ronan was kissing him. Ronan fucking Lynch was kissing him, still kissing him. Like his fucking life depended on it. The previous night had not been a fluke.

He gasped when Ronan’s tongue grazed his lower lip. Ronan took it as invitation to deepen the kiss from hungry to desperate, and then most higher brain function ceased at the slide of warm tongue in Adam’s mouth, and the quiet tug of hands at the back of his neck, pulling him closer into the kiss. Ronan tasted sweet and minty, like fancy organic toothpaste.

When they pulled apart, Adam felt dizzy, not quite himself, like he had floated off somewhere where he was not Adam Parrish and they were not, in fact, parked in front of his parents’ house. He couldn’t quite feel his toes. Ronan only looked at him for a moment, and then his sharp-edged thin lips quirked into a smile and he was turning back to the steering wheel and out of Adam’s personal space. By the time he changed gears and the car entered the highway, Adam had realized what kind of mindless danger they had just put themselves in, sitting in a car in front of the trailer park, kissing like it was the end of the world. What if his parents woke up and saw them?

It took him a while to find his voice as they drove in silence. “Why am I here?” he finally asked, not daring to look at Ronan for fear _he_ might be the one doing the jumping and then they’d careen off the highway and into wonderland. Adam wasn’t sure what he was afraid of, getting into the most horrible car accident while making out, or the thought of a wonderland in Ronan’s lips.

“Why do you want to be anywhere you are, Parrish?”

Adam didn’t quite like the snide answer. It sounded too much like his own questions. _What do you_ want _, Adam?_

To kiss Ronan Lynch.

So he did.

Ronan mercifully did not show up at the end of the garage shift. Adam wasn’t complaining about the kissing. It thrilled him how this thing between them had blossomed from the hesitant press of lips that Adam had started into the explosion of sensation that pooled in the pit of his stomach as he clung for dear life when Ronan all but climbed the center console as soon as the vehicle pulled to a stop in the parking lot of the auto shop so he could angle his body better to kiss Adam more soundly. Hands under sweatshirts and on bare skin was involved and Adam was more than a little embarrassed when his gasps for breath between kisses became heady moans when Ronan touched something in the small of his back that made him hiss and arch into the touch. If the BMW didn’t have climate control, Adam was sure the windows would have steamed, and the mortification he felt when Boyd actually tapped the window with a strange look on his face multiplied a hundred fold. He knew Boyd probably could not see them from outside, but Adam could see him and that made everything worse. He didn’t need his boss giving him the side eye, and Ronan got the hint even though he had looked through the dark tinted window and smiled nastily at Boyd before giving Adam one final parting kiss.

He shot Ronan a look before he left. “This is the last time you’re picking me up.”

Ronan grinned at him. “The hell I am.” But he didn’t argue further when Adam rolled his eyes and got out of the car. He had to understand that there were things Adam Parrish needed that sat outside the bubble of wonder and passion that existed between them. Adam had to make sure he understood that.

Boyd was waiting outside. Adam didn’t know if he was going to lose his job over his and Ronan’s inability to keep their hands to themselves. But Boyd didn’t say anything so Adam assumed he hadn’t actually seen what they were doing, and breathed a sigh of relief as he got to work. There were too many close calls for the New Year to be anything but stressful. At the end of the shift, Boyd gave him his check, and Ronan’s car was not in the parking lot, so Adam walked to the bus stop to get himself to his next job.

He and Ronan would have to talk… about things… if they were going to do this.

Ronan did show up eventually at the end of his last job for the day, and Adam was spooked as he walked from the trailer factory exit to Ronan’s car parked on the far side of the lot. This hidden away from the street lamps, Adam almost missed him, and when he did see the BMW, his mind wandered back to the scrap yard and whether Kavinsky would be there and it would be the end of this rollercoaster ride. But the scrap yard was silent, and the halogen lights were off, and there was only Ronan leaning patiently against his car.

“You didn’t bring your bike,” he said by way of greeting, and the smile he offered Adam was casual, like the loose set of his shoulders.

Adam thought there was nothing casual about Ronan being in that parking lot, waiting for him. “I can get myself home, you know.” He looked around, realized that they were alone in the parking lot as most of the other workers whose shift had ended with his had already hurried out, not wanting to be caught there in the night on a holiday.

“I know,” Ronan said with a shrug. Adam narrowed his eyes as he rounded the BMW to crowd Ronan against the driver side door.

“So what are you doing here? I told you I don’t need a ride.”

In response, Ronan grabbed the front of his shirt, wrapped an arm around his waist and kissed him. Adam thought it would be a problem if every discussion was going to end in this type of passionate make-out sessions, not only because he didn’t know exactly what he and Ronan wanted out of each other, but also because it would be awkward to walk around in public with a bulge in his pants. He broke away and glared accusingly at Ronan as he tried to chase around for Adam’s lips and settled instead for mouthing at the peach stubble at his jaw. Adam was distinctly aware that the hand at his waist was creeping up under the three layers of sweaters he wore, exposing the skin of his back to the cold air, and then immediately soothed with the heat of Ronan’s hand.

“We can’t just…” It was hard to get words out when his skin was crawling with sensation and his pulse jumping in his throat. Ronan had pulled him flush against his body and even with several layers of clothing between them, Adam was flustered at the feel of a jeans-clad thigh between his legs, dangerously close to body parts he didn’t quite want to think about just yet. “Ronan—we can’t just, _ah_ fuck!” Whatever he had been about to say was swallowed in the sensation of Ronan’s thigh moving, and he had to brace his arms on the car or he was going to convulse.

“We can’t just what, Parrish? You’re the one pinning me to the car.” Ronan’s voice was darkly amused, even as he loosened his grip on Adam’s waist.

Adam pulled back only slightly. “We’re out in public and I do not do PDA.” His mind flashed back to the last time he actually had displayed affection publicly. He and Blue had kissed, but that suddenly seemed so remote and distant against the feel of Ronan’s body. How was it even winter and Adam was sweating like it was the godawful middle of summer heat? Another thought suddenly occurred to him and he looked at Ronan’s face again, brows furrowed.

“What about Noah?” Adam suddenly said, his tone accusing.

If the thought of Ronan kissing another boy didn’t piss him off so much, Adam would have found the confused look on Ronan’s face almost adorable. “What _about_ Noah? We’re friends, so?”

“You kissed him!” Adam couldn’t keep the angry note of insecurity from creeping in his voice so when he spoke next, it was in a heated whisper so Ronan wouldn’t hear the jealousy in his words. “I saw you that night.”

Ronan only shook his head. “I know you saw us.” At least, the sardonic tinge of amusement was gone. Ronan was taking him seriously, and Adam thought that was something. “I dunno, man. You were so pissed that night. I thought it was kinda hot.”

“That’s…” He trailed off unsure if _he_ found it ridiculous that Ronan would have angry make-outs with some other boy because he found it hot when Adam was pissed off. He remembered Noah telling him not to play. It wasn’t a game. Adam wasn’t playing, but he wanted to be sure Ronan wasn’t either. “So you don’t like Noah?”

“Not like that, man.” And Adam could hear the ridiculous _no homo_ tone in Ronan’s amused voice, though with the thigh still rubbing between his legs, he felt very _yes homo_ about everything.

He pulled back, away from the car to give them some space, some air between them to return a semblance of normalcy in the rush of his pulse. “You can’t keep doing that.”

Ronan exhaled a quiet breath and pushed himself off the car as well, his hand reaching for the door handle. Adam moved back and rounded the vehicle and slid into his side. They were speeding on the freeway when Ronan finally opened his mouth again.

“I know,” he said quietly. His eyes were thoughtful when he glanced at Adam, and Adam saw that the hand on the gearshift was upturned, inviting. “I won’t do that to you.”

Adam slipped his hand into Ronan’s and twined their fingers. He wanted to say that he wouldn’t do that to Ronan either, but Noah’s accusing voice telling him to _Stop playing with him, Adam_ , kept his mouth shut, and he hoped Ronan knew he wasn’t when he squeezed his hand in the dark.

 

Gansey was the first to notice, once he got back, that there was something different, and he cornered Ronan at third period World History. Adam was in a different class, and Ronan wondered what tipped him off because even though there had been a lot of heavy kissing and groping in the BMW after Ronan picked Adam up from his work shift before school, the two of them had mostly kept their hands to themselves as soon as the Aglionby gates were visible.

Ronan didn’t really care either way what people would think if they saw him kissing Adam, but after the episode in the auto shop (and after realizing that Adam could seriously get hurt if anyone from Adam’s side of Henrietta saw them together like that), he made sure they were really alone when things became too hot. It meant that they were confined to making out mostly only inside the heavily tinted car when parked on a lonely stretch of road, or in the dark of the parking lot at the trailer factory at the end of Adam’s late shift. Ronan didn’t like the secrecy, but Adam was incredibly skittish and jumpy at the idea that anyone his parents might know would see them, and he could appreciate that maybe Adam didn’t want bruises decorating his face, so the thing between them stayed mostly hidden away, even from their friends once they got back. Adam was extremely wary of Noah, especially. His eyes would dart between Ronan and Noah when Noah got back and broke out the holiday loot for all of his friends, and Ronan wanted very badly to take his hand and reassure him that no, he wasn’t going to go around angry-kissing his friends anymore whenever he was frustrated, especially not now that he could kiss Adam, but Adam was closed off and silent through that evening, eventually only relaxing when they were out of Monmouth and speeding on the highway to the trailer park. That night, like every other night since New Year’s Eve, Ronan did not want to drop Adam off to the double wide and would have spirited him away to the Barns forever if Adam would only let him.

When winter break ended and school started, it was just one more place to layer on the secrecy, and by then, Ronan had mostly gotten the hang of what Adam was willing to give. He wasn’t particularly happy about being unceremoniously shoved back into the proverbial closet with their relationship not after he had only very recently come to terms with himself when he met Adam, but Adam seemed to need it, and Ronan was willing to go along with whatever made Adam happy, because it was such a rare gift in the tragedy of Adam Parrish’s life.

When Gansey arrived at third period ten minutes before the first bell, Ronan knew something was up and their cover was blown. He worried that Adam might not be too happy about this.

“Did something happen?” Gansey’s voice was tentative as he lowered himself on the seat in front of Ronan at the back of the class. Ronan narrowed his eyes but didn’t comment. He wouldn’t encourage the questions, though he wasn’t going to lie to his best friend if Gansey upfront asked about him and Adam. “I mean, while I was away?”

“Lots of things happened, man,” he said evenly. “I told you, my mom’s home.”

Gansey frowned but nodded. “Yeah, I know that.” The frown deepened as Gansey appeared to be warring with himself whether he wanted to be proper or he wanted to be nosy. “Has Adam said something to you?”

Ronan didn’t know what Gansey meant by that or whether it had anything to do with the fact that he and Adam had been making out (maybe more, but Ronan was patient about that because Adam was evidently not ready for anything more than kissing). “Like what?”

“What did he do for New Year?” Gansey asked point blank, annoyed over Ronan’s obtuse answers. “I called him on New Year’s Eve. He didn’t sound too happy.” Gansey sighed when Ronan didn’t answer. “I’m worried about him, Ronan. He sounded upset. I thought, since you were here, you might’ve seen him and he’d told you anything.”

Ronan didn’t think Adam seemed particularly upset at any time they met to kiss and grope in the privacy of Ronan’s car throughout the rest of the winter break. He thought Adam quite enjoyed all the kissing, even though he was cagey going beyond casual groping. Sure, there were moments when Adam would suddenly fall silent and look thoughtful, but Ronan always thought it had more to do with Adam’s overall introspective nature than anything bothering him.

“I brought him along to the Barns,” he said slowly, frowning and trying to remember if he’d maybe missed anything that Gansey could see. But no, Adam had been happy whenever Ronan saw him. “He was okay.”

“Okay,” Gansey said, unwilling to drop the subject but clearly seeing that Ronan had nothing more to say. He had half-turned to his desk as other students began to pour into the classroom, when he turned back to Ronan, eyes flashing. “So, when were you going to tell me about that?”

He prodded his pen to the front of Ronan’s tie. Ronan realized that his overall sloppiness with his uniform had given him away. He’d left the top button of his dress shirt undone, and his tie partially loosened so it didn’t strangle him, and he realized it exposed the juncture of his neck and shoulder, where ink hooked black marks up the back and side of his neck, and where Adam had bitten him when their groping in the car had turned intense that morning, and now there’s was a curved red mark between the hooks of his tattoo that was going to darken into the shape of Adam’s teeth.

He buttoned his dress shirt primly, though his left his tie a mess. He didn’t want to lie to Gansey but this was really all between him and Adam. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The second bell rang, and their teacher was in and about to start the lecture. Ronan slouched in his seat, relieved that Gansey had stopped looking at his neck, though he grinned knowingly at Ronan before he finally turned back to his desk to pay attention to the lecture. Ronan flushed and vowed to bite Adam back so that he would have to deal with the uncomfortable 20 questions instead.

He told Adam as much as they sat in the BMW that night, parked outside the trailer factory after Adam’s work shift. It was almost midnight, and in the gloom, Ronan thought he saw the tired moonbeams under Adam’s eyes when he broached the topic of telling their friends. Adam sighed.

“Gansey or Blue or Noah not knowing isn’t really the problem.” He scratched the back of his head, frustration building when Ronan wouldn’t kiss back after he told Adam about lying to Gansey.

Ronan squared his jaw. “Then I don’t really know what is. They’re gonna find out eventually, you know. We see them almost everyday now for practice.”

Adam turned to face him. His eyes were almost black in the gloom, wide and open and fearful. When he opened his mouth to talk, it wasn’t the quite the words Ronan expected. “What are we?”

When he didn’t answer, Adam pushed on, the expression on his face growing more and more agitated. Ronan had noticed he had started pulling at the sleeves of his coveralls again, a nervous tick that he had stopped doing since they kissed. It was back now in full force and Ronan was almost afraid Adam would rip his clothes with his jerky movements.

“I mean, what are we, Ronan? Are we, like, together… or are we just having f-fun?” His lips stumbled over the idea that whatever they had between them was just that: fun and casual. Ronan couldn’t believe he would even ask him about this.

“What do you think, Parrish?” He snorted impatiently when Adam only glared at him. He couldn’t believe that after all this time, Adam didn’t know that Ronan Lynch did not do anything casually. Everything had a purpose. Everything. “I’m going to take you home now.”

Adam’s hand on the wheel stopped him. “No, wait.” He looked at Ronan again. “Do you mean it?”

“Mean what?” He sighed when Adam didn’t answer. “I can’t fucking read your mind, you know.”

Again, Adam didn’t answer, and Ronan was too annoyed with him to ask what the fuck his problem was. If Adam didn’t want to talk, that was his problem. He punched at the stereo and was even more annoyed when he realized that his phone playlist was on a recording of their usual practice set list. Usually, hearing the sound of Adam’s voice singing cleared his head, but now, as he listened to Adam humming along to the sound of his own voice, Ronan wanted to break something. He floored the accelerator instead. The BMW purred as the music crested.

They passed streetlight after streetlight, coasting through the green, burning through amber. The road was deserted this late at night. Ronan felt like he was going to explode. He stopped at the first red light they encountered, the BMW nosing up to the left of a white Mitsubishi Evo with a crass knife graphic running along its side from fender to rear bumper.

The driver’s side window slid down. Kavinsky’s leering face grinned at them, mouthed words that ended suspiciously like “- _unt_ ”. Ronan grinned unpleasantly, revving the engine. Beside him, Adam stared stonily ahead, but his hand reached for the strap on the ceiling.

Ronan rolled down the window to Adam’s side, thin smile widening at the sour expression on Kavinsky’s face, even from behind his ridiculous white-rimmed shades. He recovered quickly though, sneering at the way Adam studiously did not look at him.

“Hey, Sweet Cheeks.” The lazy drawl was punctuated with the growl of his own car.

“Eat shit, Russian,” Ronan retorted, nosing the car minutely forward. His nerves tingled with adrenaline.

“Wasn’t talking to you, asswipe,” Kavinsky replied easily.

Ronan grinned smugly as Adam’s left hand reached for his arm, gripping tightly. Kavinsky didn’t miss it, and the sour expression snaked back to his face before he could school it back to the wild smile he reserved only for racing Ronan Lynch. Engines growled in anticipation of the green light. Vaguely, Ronan could feel Adam shifting, digging his feet into the floor of the car even as his left hand gripped Ronan’s arm painfully. The light blinked green, and the cars lurched forward. The world narrowed into pinpricks. Muscle memory dictated Ronan’s movements across his car’s gears. First to second, second to third, trail of white looming in the side mirror. Adam’s blunt nails digging into his skin as he switched to fourth gear. In the mirrors, Kavinsky fucked up the gear switch and fell behind, a speck of white in the retreating darkness. Ronan cackled with delight as he sped on the open road. Beside him, Adam looked as if he was scarcely breathing. Kavinsky’s car had disappeared from view. Ronan took the turn that would bring them to the trailer park.

The car rolled to a stop about half a mile from the driveway that would lead to the double wide. Adam was still gripping his arm and he didn’t let go until Ronan pulled up the hand break. Without warning, he suddenly launched himself on Ronan, climbing feverishly over the console into Ronan’s lap, deftly maneuvering his body out of the way of the steering wheel until they were flush, forehead to groin, Adam’s legs splayed messily on the sides of the driver’s seat, his mouth hot and wet and devouring Ronan in an all-consuming hunger, while his hips stuttered a staccato rhythm against Ronan’s belly, the silence in the car punctuated by hot gasps when Ronan bit into his neck and ground up to Adam’s ass in response to the rutting. And between hands warring with layers of winter clothing, trying to find bare skin, they manage to get Adam’s coveralls pushed down to his waist, the two shirts he wore inside rucked up to his armpits but never completely taken off. Ronan’s sweatshirt disappeared to the backseat, jeans unbuttoned, fly unzipped and then hands in each other’s boxers, wild and uncoordinated but so, so good.

Ronan came first, body seizing up as ecstasy overtook adrenaline, making his fingertips tingle and his vision bleed white. Dimly, he felt Adam grind against him in desperation when the hand on him stilled, before he froze, let out a low, shameless moan and came all over his pants and Ronan’s stomach, and then he sank, boneless, into his arms, chest heaving for breath. Ronan made a face when he felt warm wetness on his belly, and the smell of sex filled the car.

“Gross,” he muttered and wiped the come away with Adam’s shirt. He mock-glared accusingly at Adam. “Man, I’m a virgin and saving myself for marriage, you know.”

Adam laughed breathlessly and peeled himself off Ronan, tugging down his shirts and zipping up his coveralls to hide the wet spot in his underwear and jeans that he wore under the coveralls. “We both are, bet.”

Adam reached into the back seat to get Ronan’s sweatshirt and shifted himself back into the passenger seat. They sat in the car in sated silence for a while, waiting for their racing hearts to finally calm down. The playlist in Ronan’s phone had long since played its last song, so Ronan fiddled with it to play the music again. Adam’s head, leaning tiredly against the headrest, lolled to the side and he smiled languidly at Ronan.

“I think you did,” he said softly as they both listened to the music playing.

_Close your eyes_   
_Dry your tears_   
_'Coz when nothing seems clear  
You'll be safe here_

_From the sheer weight_   
_Of your doubts and fears_   
_Weary heart  
You'll be safe here_

Ronan reached across the console and swept the dirt-colored locks plastered on Adam’s forehead from his face. He smiled when Adam looked over at him quizzically. And then he was pulling down the hand break and eventually pulling over in the gutted driveway of the trailer park. They didn’t talk any more, just kissed quietly, and then Adam was getting out of the car and trudging up the steps to the double wide. When he was finally inside, Ronan reversed out of the driveway and sped home.

Adam was right, he did mean it. Every single word.

  
  
  


In the end, it was even harder to keep their relationship on the down low, especially when practice for Band Night began in earnest and Blue and Noah’s curiosity over their closeness was added into the mix. Gansey, at least, was polite and respected boundaries. He didn’t pester Ronan anymore about Adam after that conversation in World History class, though every time he saw the two of them working on the guitar chords or going over the lyrics of the new song, he would cock a curious eyebrow before turning to work with Blue on the bass lines. Noah and Blue had no such boundaries, and Blue constantly badgered Adam about the spring in his step and the glint in his eye that no one had ever noticed before, and Noah cornered Ronan every morning when Ronan slammed out of his room to shower and get ready for school.

Ronan considered just moving back to the Barns so he didn’t need to put up with the bullshit, but the commute was terrible and Aurora wanted her children to continue schooling with no hassle, and anyway, she told her older sons, she had a nurse and her doctor came by twice a week to check on her well-being. Ronan found it less than ideal, but she was right, the drive would easily take an hour, even when he sped over the limit, and since he shuttled Adam to his job in the early morning, and back to the trailer park late at night, it would have been too much, too tiring to keep up.

Meanwhile, the two of them had not had a reprisal of that night that Ronan raced Kavinsky. Neither of them spoke of it, but something had obviously changed in the way they were together. The kisses and touches continued to be hot and frantic and sometimes desperate. But there were also moments when they would just sit quietly in the car, enjoying each other’s company, or talking about their day, their interests, their music, everything there really was to talk about between two teenage boys that just happened to make out every once in a while. Now too, Adam had no compunctions if he was caught staring at Ronan for too long, even in the company of others. He wasn’t uncomfortable when they held hands under the table when the group would have dinner at Nino’s. And although he complained that he didn’t need the Disney Princess treatment, he never made Ronan leave whenever Ronan showed up at his workplace to take him to wherever.

Still, they never quite openly talked about what they were to their friends. Ronan could easily ignore the teasing: Blue and Noah were his friends and the banter was harmless and friendly, but one evening, Adam finally had enough of the teasing, especially Noah’s relentless eyebrow wagging when he and Ronan were bent over a sheet of guitar chords, discussing some changes he wanted to put into their performance of _Ex-Girlfriend_.

He looked up at Noah, who was perched on the couch, spinning a drumstick on one hand, grinning at the two of them knowingly. “You got a problem?”

Noah scrunched up his face like a kitten smelling milk. “Um. Not really.” He pursed his lips and pointed at Ronan with his mouth. “I think you’re busy.”

Adam sighed, exasperated. “We kind of are.”

“Not with that,” Noah said meaningfully.

Ronan thought he knew where this was leading, because Noah’s pointed quips always started with casual conversation before he dove into the most godawful intrusive set of questions anyone ever thought to ask. He scratched the back of his head. “Parrish, pay attention or you’ll mess up the lyrics again. It’s not a fucking rap song.”

Noah sniggered. Ronan didn’t know what it was but this evidently set Adam off because he stood up suddenly and grabbed Ronan’s arm and started to drag him out.

“What the fuck--?”

“I’m tired of dancing around all these social rules so listen the fuck up everyone,” he ground out. The grip on Ronan’s arm tightened, like that time he raced Kavinsky, and a thrill of desire shot through him at the sight of Adam’s dangerous, glittering eyes that pinned Noah with a stern look, and it was like he deliberately chose the crudest way to describe their relationship so as to offend as many ears as he could. “Not like it’s anyone’s business but yes, Ronan and I are fucking each other, thank you very much. I thought it would be kind of nice not to have to announce it to the world in general, since, you know, we’re not famous or anything, but it’s been feeling like fucking TMZ is camping out our doors to watch us trip over ourselves.”

He exhaled sharply, still glaring at Noah. Blue and Gansey, previously bent over Gansey’s keyboard, goggled at three of them from the other side of the room. Ronan only smiled. He found this pissed off Adam incredibly hot.

Adam continued his tirade. “And it’d be really if nice people would leave us the fuck alone when we need to kiss or hold hands or whatever. I’m not pushing my gay all over your faces so I’d appreciate not having anyone’s noses up our asses when we fuck.” He tugged at Ronan’s arm to tell him to get up. “Come on, I want to go home.”

Blue giggled and really, Adam walked into his own punch line. “Is that a euphemism for sex?”

Ronan schooled his face into a look of long-suffering weariness as Adam half-dragged, half-pushed him out of the door. “Fuck off, Sargent. If I don’t get lucky because of you, you and Gansey’ll never get any alone time in this apartment.”

He no longer heard what Blue had to say because Adam slammed the door behind them, shoved Ronan into his car, and then proceeded to demonstrate exactly how lucky Ronan was, in fact, going to get that night. It was a long moment before Ronan was finally in any shape to drive him home, but the look of smug pride in Adam’s face when he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand was completely worth it.

Ronan could only look at him in wonder as he started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “Christ, Parrish.” He gulped and tried to catch his breath when his pulse finally stopped trying to hammer out of his neck. “You swallowed.”

Once upon a time, Ronan thought that Noah was the master of the shit-eating smile, but the grin that Adam flashed him, all smug and straight teeth, was a fucking work of art.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lyrics here are once again from You'll Be Safe Here, by Rivermaya.
> 
> I loved writing the scenes in this chapter. Mwahahahaha.


	16. If This Was A Movie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one in which Band Night happens.

The days moved inexorably forward as Band Night loomed. Adam enjoyed the practice more than anything else. It was when the five of them hit their groove in the music that he felt most alive, his fingertips tingling as he strummed the rhythm for Ronan’s lead, his ears ringing with the crash of Noah’s cymbals. His blood sang with the thump of Blue’s bass lines, the melody of Gansey’s keyboard. And when he sang, it felt like release, almost as sweet as the night he and Ronan had been together.

They had not had sex again since the night he had exploded angrily at Noah over his and Ronan’s relationship. Blue and Noah mercilessly teased them about angry fucking, and Adam was too embarrassed to admit that he did get off on the anger and frustration that burned inside him. Ronan was absolutely no help. He was utterly perplexed by Adam’s mood swings, and inexplicably enough, too shy to initiate any sexual overtures of his own, so the nights after practice when both of them were too wound up with pent-up energy ended with a lot of frustrated kissing and Adam eventually getting off the car to walk his frustration home because Ronan refused to initiate anything.

He didn’t understand any of it: it wasn’t like either of them had problems with sex in general, or sex with each other. They’d already gotten each other off once, and Adam had already blown Ronan once. (In hindsight, he realized he probably may have moved too fast that night, but he had been so angry with all the baiting that by the time he got Ronan alone, he couldn’t help himself, and he wondered if in fact Ronan had been a bit put off by the unexpected forwardness, but Adam was sure he enjoyed himself, if the sounds he was making were to be any indication.)

Still, he supposed all of the sexual frustration made for good music, because three nights from band night, Ronan announced their band was finally ready to be heard by the outside world. Gansey contacted the organizers with their song line-up, and they gathered for final practice. There would be no more practices after that night to give Adam’s voice a rest from the singing, and Blue teased that they probably shouldn’t be thinking about blow jobs either if Adam didn’t want to be croaking on stage on Band Night. Ronan blushed so hard from the tips of his ears down to his neck. Adam scowled and didn’t say anything more.

When practice ended, Gansey announced that because they still did not have a band name, he’d taken the liberty of choosing one for them: The Raven King, so chosen for his current obsession with obscure legends on Welsh kings purportedly buried in Virginia. Adam didn’t know much about the subject, and since none of the others protested over the general geekiness of choosing a name from historical legends, he didn’t really care either way. What the name did symbolize was their togetherness as a band—something he had always longed for from the day that he first showed up at Monmouth.

Ronan drove him to the trailer factory after practice that night. He still had a four-hour shift until midnight. He was early, at half-past seven. Ronan parked in the far corner away from the shine of streetlights, and at wasn’t long before they were once again hot and heavy on each other, and they were scrambling for the back seat as first Ronan’s shirt was discarded over the steering wheel and then Adam’s coveralls got lower and lower and eventually had to be tugged off, and then the shock of cold air on bare skin seemed to have brought Ronan to his senses and he suddenly stopped. Adam attempted to angle himself differently, but Ronan waved him away, a strange look on his face that Adam could not decipher in the gloom.

“What?” he demanded irritably, suddenly feeling embarrassed that he was mostly left in his underwear and Ronan was still in pants.

Ronan exhaled and reached for his shirt. Make-out time was evidently over. “I’m not doing this now.”

Adam still did not understand. “What the fuck--? You seemed pretty damn eager to do whatever just now.” He didn’t make a move to dress himself.

Ronan glared at him but didn’t say anything. He moved to the front of the car, back to the driver seat. Adam sighed in angry frustration as he reached for his own shirt and then angrily tugged on his coveralls and zipped it to his neck. He could still feel a vague ache on his collarbone where Ronan had just bitten him and it might not be a good idea to leave that area exposed to any prying eyes, especially at his job. He suddenly realized that Ronan may actually be pulling away to protect him from any consequences their relationship may have over his employment, or even over the threat of his parents discovering them. His mind doubled back to that crazy moment on New Year’s Day when they had made out in the car, right in front of the double wide. The thrill of danger both sang into his veins and filled him with dread.

He looked at Ronan with flashing, angry eyes as he tried to push down his desire and the sting of rejection. “If you’re worried about my job, you know I can handle myself without your help.”

Ronan rolled his eyes and tapped a finger impatiently on the steering wheel, but did not turn to look at Adam in the back seat. “I’m sure,” he sneered.

Adam just about felt the last bit of his patience snap. “Get the fuck over yourself. I don’t need your help.” He yanked the backseat door open and stomped out. Ronan followed. Adam glared at him, annoyed beyond belief. “Look, if you have a problem with—“ he gestured wildly between the two of them, unsure what exactly he thought Ronan would be angry about, “—all this, I’m not asking you to drive me here to do anything.”

He exhaled loudly when he realized he’d been shouting and a few of his co-workers who had just now started to arrive in trickles had glanced in their direction on hearing his voice. Ronan crossed his arms before his chest and stared back at him with his glittering eyes.

“I don’t have a problem with anything, Parrish,” he said evenly, still staring at Adam. Adam yanked at the sleeves of his coveralls and glared back. “What I care about is the two of us not confined to my fucking car whenever we kiss or hold hands or, I don’t know, fucking whatever. I know you’ve told our friends, but I don’t appreciate being a secret that you just shove off from whenever it’s convenient to you, whenever other people are around.”

He stopped pulling at his sleeves, eyes darting up to Ronan’s closed off face. He didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh in derision or cry with relief. “Oh my God, I can’t believe this. You cockblock me in the middle of—oh God, you fucking dork!” He couldn’t help the laugh the finally bubbled out of his throat and he grabbed Ronan by the neck and kissed his temple.

Ronan only struggled minutely before he sighed and melted against Adam’s arms. “Stop laughing, you!”

Adam laughed even harder, his sides going in stitches at the embarrassed tinge of pink in Ronan’s ears, visible even in the meager illumination of streetlamps. “You’re an idiot.” He kissed him again when he finally got the giggles under control, and he made sure the people who passed by had no doubts who he was kissing. “I’m not shoving you off into your closet. It’s just… it’d be nice if people didn’t look at us weird, you know? I feel like everyone keeps staring if I so much as breathe around you.” He shook his head. “Like I don’t have a right to  _ be _ with you.”

Ronan glared at him incredulously. “You and your fucking insecurity issues.”

But he didn’t struggle anymore. They stayed like that, Adam leaning against the car, one arm around Ronan’s neck, and Ronan leaning against his chest, eerily quiet and content, until it was time for Adam to let go and get to work. That night, while he worked, he thought about all of the times the two of them had kissed, the times they made music, and he realized that he was happy and no longer insecure of whatever he felt was keeping them apart. He realized that he didn’t care if his parents found out (though his bones ached at the thought of getting another beating, he didn’t care what his dad’s opinion was, if he thought he was a pussy for kissing another boy). He didn’t care about Blue and Noah’s teasing. And he found he didn’t even care about Noah’s admonition the day before New Year’s Eve, when he told Adam not to play.

He wasn’t playing. Ronan wasn’t playing either. Adam didn’t know exactly what love meant, having grown up never experiencing it, but he thought, as he went through all of the times he and Ronan had kissed, that he probably had the closest thing to it.

  
  
  


Band Night came on a Friday, and none too soon. Adam begged off the two jobs he had lined up that evening because he couldn’t focus. His nerves were jumpy and he had trouble enough concentrating in school. If he had to work, he was sure he was going to seriously fuck up car repairs or otherwise injure himself on job. He wasn’t the only one nervous. Ronan had been so on edge, he’d dented his locker door slamming it too hard, and was sent for a two-hour detention. Gansey drove Adam and Noah back to Monmouth, picking Blue up on the way, so they could pack their instruments while Ronan stewed in detention.

It took longest to pack Noah’s drum set and get it into the boot of the Camaro. By the time Ronan finished with detention, the three boys had changed out of their uniforms and into casual clothing. They managed to convince Gansey to trade his signature polo shirts for t-shirt and jeans, although he maintained that boat shoes were necessary for his comfort and peace of mind. Blue wore a shredded tulle and lace ensemble over a neon green sheath dress that had both Adam and Gansey staring until Ronan cleared his throat angrily and told Adam snidely that threadbare jeans that were too loose to be hip just wouldn’t cut their image. Noah shook out a pair of midnight bondage pants and wiggled his brows at Adam suggestively. Blue and Ronan badgered him until he agreed to fit it, and it did because Adam was so skinny, and Ronan had stared at him so admiringly that, although the strap between the knees felt weird and limited his movement, he agreed to keep it on and paired it with a faded Coca Cola shirt that hung loose over his slim shoulders. Noah teased that they better not be hearing loud moaning noises from Ronan’s room once they came back from their performance, before disappearing to his own room to change into the strangest combination of a plaid skirt, jacket and pants suit that hurt Adam’s eyes with all of the print and colors when he finally came out. Ronan was the one who looked the most normal, and that was only because he always wore muscle tees and shredded black jeans anyway.

They checked off their equipment and was finally ready to go, group split into two vehicles with Noah and Blue riding with Gansey and the drum set, and Adam riding with Ronan and the rest of their guitars, keyboards and amps. The venue was already packed when they arrived, with teenagers from Mountain View, Aglionby and a few other nearby schools and colleges milling about, drinking beer and probably trading illegal substances.

Adam gave his guitar a last tune-up, and shook out his hands, and then his hair. He crackled with nervous energy as their band waited their turn on the stage. Around him, Noah fiddled with his drumsticks absently, while Gansey and Ronan busied themselves with ensuring they were all setup properly. Blue waved him over, just as the raucous crash of drums from another band resounded in the backstage. When he leaned in, she brandished a black kohl liner at his face threateningly.

“You’re not putting that on my face,” Adam whispered heatedly. Blue pinched his cheek, tugged at his chin and demanded him to close his eyes or she would poke it with the liner. Adam pretended to be completely put upon, but obligingly closed his eyes and allowed her to line his lids and waterline. He blinked back tears when she was done.

“You’re so hot now I could kiss you,” she said, grinning as she used the tip of her index finger to smudge the bit of liner winged out at the corners of his eyes, and then grabbed Gansey’s phone just as he was checking his list of things they needed to get ready, and snapped a picture of a shell-shocked Adam with his eyes wide and smudged with kohl, mouth hanging open in surprise, and Ronan’s wickedly grinning face in the background.

Adam couldn’t be sure if he liked looking like a make-up artist’s reject project. He didn’t look too bad, he hoped, though if Ronan’s smile was any indication, Blue was probably right. She smirked at him and tossed the phone back to Gansey.

“You and your boyfriend can thank me later, once we’re done and you’ve thoroughly fucked.”

Ronan’s gazed at her in admiration and held up a fist, which she bumped enthusiastically. “Better get yourselves ear plugs for when I tie up Parrish to my bed tonight, then.” He grabbed Noah by the neck and crushed both him and Adam to his sides, smushing his face into the side of Adam’s flushed face. “Take another fucking picture, Gansey!”

Blue and Gansey inserted themselves into the front-facing camera before they heard the snap of the camera app. And then they were being ushered on to the stage to take their positions. Adam grabbed the mic stand with trepidation as he waited for the rest of his band mates to take their places. Ronan nodded to Noah, who counted them off and then they were playing, and it was wonder and magic and excitement and Adam felt a shocking burst of electricity run up his spine as he opened his mouth to sing. They finally made it.

They started with the covers first, Adam, to Ronan’s chagrin, insisting on rapping  _ Ex-Girlfriend _ with Blue. He could barely hear himself above the din of Noah’s drums and the enthusiastic cheer from the crowd. There were faces he recognized and faces that just blurred in the lights and the noise and the background, and then the music quieted for  _ Wildest Dreams _ . They heard cat calls directed at him and Blue when they sang in harmony, but none quite as loud as when they got to Ronan’s composition of  _ You’ll Be Safe Here, _ as Adam draped one arm over him as the music rose to a crescendo and they sang together into Adam’s mic:

_ In my arms _

_ Through the long cold night _

_ Sleep tight _

_ You'll be safe here _

_ When no one understands _

_ I'll believe _

_ You'll be safe, _

_ You'll be safe _

_ You'll be safe here _

_ Put your heart in my hands _

_ You'll be safe here _

Adam was sure no one in Aglionby or his old school mates in Mountain View knew about him and Ronan, but the music was too good, the lights too bright, the song too heartfelt. He hadn’t been able to help himself. He grinned into the crowd as the music finally died down and yelled into the mic,

“And that’s all! Thanks, everyone, we’re The Raven King, signing out!”

The exhilaration thrummed in his blood as the five of them were ushered backstage, wearing matching giddy smiles as they laughed and almost cried at the fading sound of cheers, and they had to take a long moment to still their pounding hearts as they all hugged each other, sweaty and happy and triumphant. It was a night of celebration.

They decided to stick around to watch the other bands play. Adam would have actually preferred to have left, his ears were ringing and when they were ushered out of the backstage, he found the crowd triggering a claustrophobia he had never realized he had, but people were coming up to them and congratulating them on their performance, and Adam could not bring himself to suggest leaving when Blue, Gansey, Noah and Ronan were so enthusiastically soaking up the glory of their performance. This was their collective dream.

After a while, Blue and Gansey drifted off on their own private date to watch the other bands playing. Noah went to look for weed or alcohol (Adam didn’t know how his friends managed to get them but they did because after a while, Noah was back passing a red cup to Ronan, who cheered triumphantly before taking a long drought, before Noah wandered away again to give the two of them some privacy.) The two of them huddled at the back of the venue together where the sound was a bit more muted, Ronan enjoying his beer, Adam leaning against Ronan and enjoying the music with his eyes closed. He thought there was something familiar about the sound, but he was still so wound up with their own music that he couldn’t place it.

It was when he heard a voice calling his name, not Ronan’s or Noah’s or any of their friends’, but distinctly Aglionby that the energy in his veins started to sour. Ronan nudged him in the ribs with an elbow and Adam’s eyes flew open as he realized that Tad Carruthers, from their Latin class, and Kavinsky’s chemistry class was standing in front of them, grinning and trying to bump fists with Ronan, who was standing stock still, brows furrowed in annoyance, back ramrod straight in what Adam had now come to recognize as the beginnings of anger. Tad was talking, saying something to Adam, but Adam couldn’t quite hear him above the din of the crowd and the music.

“…didn’t know Parrish played for your band, Lynch. I mean, oh my God, have you, like heard him sing with K? Fucking sick, man!”

Adam realized belatedly that Tad had also seen him play with Kavinsky’s band. When he looked up, he saw that in fact, it was Kavinsky’s band on stage, and the familiarity of the tune he heard was no fluke but the song that he had written with Kavinsky, the one that he sang in the scrap yard. And then before Adam could do anything about it, Tad was taking out his phone and flashing the video of him singing for the Dream Pack to Ronan’s face.

He didn’t have to see what was happening after that because his body reacted before his mind registered the movement. He staggered back and nearly fell when Ronan’s body lurched forward, wound up anger, pent-up energy, frustration and something else Adam could not understand much less decipher in the heat of that moment, propelling him forward. Adam wasn’t on the receiving end, but his body crumpled just the same when Ronan’s fist connected with Tad Carruthers’ face, the meaty sound of flesh on flesh, of teeth grinding and then breaking off louder than the wail of Kavinsky’s guitar or the keening of Prokopenko’s vocals. There was blood, not his, a tooth spat out, the smell of sweat and saliva and the sound of yelling and screaming as Blue and Gansey and Noah ran up to Ronan to try to haul him off Tad as the two of them got into a spirited punching match.

Adam didn’t see it. He didn’t feel it. All of a sudden, he was back in the trailer park, lying on the floor, the stench of vomit and acid in the threadbare carpet, his face in the dirt, his father’s harsh voice yelling an incomprehensible, guttural swear at how he was useless, he was stupid, he was a pussy, he should get up, he should stop being trash in the trailer park dirt. Suddenly, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe, and all he could feel was the rush of movement around him as he began to shake violently. Band Night disintegrated into chaos and pounding, paralyzing anxiety. Dimly, he thought he heard Blue yelling desperately, “Adam! Adam! Guys, there’s something wrong with Adam!”

He thought he felt another flurry of movement, Gansey, maybe Noah trying to shield him from suddenly curious onlookers as he gasped for breath, his eyes watering and unable to focus. Somewhere further away, someone was hauling Ronan off of Carruthers, someone else yelling for venue security. Adam couldn’t stop the frantic babble that erupted from his chest as he repeated hoarsely, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” And then, finally, he couldn’t take it all. The sudden movement, the crowd pressing in, the sound of Kavinsky’s guitar reminding him of his guilt, of Prokopenko singing out of tune,  the echo of Noah’s voice in his head, reminding him sternly— _ this is not a game, Adam! Stop playing with Ronan! You’re playing with fire! _ — the accusing look in Ronan’s eyes that glittered in the darkness and bore holes into his soul.

He fled and he did not look back.

In most ways, Adam’s breakdown on Band Night should have been like that time when Adam had been mad at everyone for trying to stage an intervention on his life when they found out his father had been abusing him. They expected him to be mad, although they weren’t quite sure what Adam should have been mad at, maybe at the fact that he had broken down where people would see him because he certainly had no right to be mad about sneaking around behind the band to write songs with and play with Kavinsky’s band. They expected Ronan to be mad too, caught up in his jealous rage over Adam playing for Kavinsky after he’d told him not to. He never did tell Adam anything because Adam would never back down from whatever stupid choices he made with his life, but the understanding had been there and Ronan felt completely betrayed. They expected the two of them wouldn’t talk, maybe would pretend the other didn’t exist. And then their anger would burn out, and before long, there would be I’m sorry’s and soft kissing by the car, a lot of make-up sex to be had (hopefully where Gansey and Noah and Blue didn’t have to see or hear).

But it never happened. Ronan had almost been arrested. Tad Carruthers lost a tooth or two, though there had been no real damage to his face, but security had been called and that had brought the police in, and finally, Gansey had to step in with a lot of thinly veiled comments over the “misunderstanding”. Noah tried to chase after Adam that night, but by the time they had thought to run after him, he had disappeared. And then, at the end of the night, Ronan smashed his fist again into Kavinsky’s face. Kavinsky still had his nose in a bind from the time Ronan tried to break it, but he took the punch and leered at Ronan and asked pointedly where his bitch, Parrish, had gone and that they had music to write together. Gansey nearly had to call security again because Ronan was hell-bent on murdering Kavinsky with his bare hands. In the end, Noah had to send Blue home in Ronan’s car, and Gansey had to haul Ronan back to Monmouth because if he couldn’t kill Carruthers or Kavinsky, or maybe even Adam, he had every fucking right to drink double his body weight in alcohol, and he proceeded to get completely smashed before Gansey finally managed to wrestle him into the Camaro and drive them home without further incident.

Gansey managed to convince Ronan to try to come to school on Monday, hoping he could convince Ronan and Adam to make up, but Adam didn’t show up to school, so Ronan left by third period. At the end of that week, Adam still did not show up, and Gansey didn’t know where Ronan had gone because he got home and the BMW wasn’t in the parking lot, and Ronan’s room was completely trashed. When Noah came home from his swim meet, he told Gansey that he knew about the video, about Adam meeting Kavinsky, about him writing music for Kavinsky, even when he was in their band. And Gansey worried that maybe Ronan equated the music with sex or intimacy, because Adam’s words on K’s song had been bizarrely sexual and bordered on dirty, and now Gansey wondered if there had, in fact, been any cheating involved.

Adam came back to school the week after that, looking worse for wear. His uniform was still impeccable, any loose threads neatly tucked and hidden, uneven hair combed neatly, but his eyes held no soul, and there was a small purple bruise at the side of his head, near his left ear. He completely ignored Gansey and Noah, and focused only on their study material. He didn’t seem at all surprised that Ronan had disappeared, and the only time anyone ever got a reaction from him was when Blue cornered him outside the Aglionby school gates on a Friday, sometime in mid-February, and asked him upfront if he cheated on Ronan. Adam told her, in no uncertain terms, to shove her accusation up her ass and hoped she choked on it. Although his voice shook with anger, his face was blank, and his eyes were dead, and there was a tremor in the hand that held the handlebar of his bike, before he finally slunk away unsteadily on his bicycle. And that was when they realized that it was over: there was no Ronan and Adam, so there would be no more band, no more Raven King, no more music.

Eventually, Noah discovered that Ronan had moved back to his parents’ house. Gansey and he tried to take a trip to Singer’s Falls one weekend to talk some sense into Ronan. The school had written to Declan about Ronan’s truancy and he would get kicked out if he didn’t start showing up to class and improving his grade. Declan had shared the information to Gansey, his voice dripping in triumph that Ronan would not be able to fulfill the conditions of their father’s will that he finish his education in order for him to inherit the Barns and everything else that had been willed to his name.

He was mucking in the mud near one of the larger barns that held the cows when Gansey and Noah had shown up, and he told them that he didn’t care if Declan inherited the whole damn property. It belonged to a trust, so he would never be able to sell it off. Ronan didn’t want the music anymore. He just wanted to be left in peace in the Barns, and no one was ever allowed to mention Adam’s name because he didn’t, he really didn’t care what kind of trouble Adam Parrish had gotten himself into anymore. It was over, they were through and Ronan had no more energy for that bullshit.

Eventually, Aurora called the two boys in and told them her son just needed time: he’d be fine, she said. At least, they supposed, he wasn’t drinking or racing or picking fights or trying to murder their classmates who may or may not have slept with his boyfriend. Gansey had still tried to reason that a song was not the same as a kiss or touch and that they knew Adam and Adam was their friend, and they knew he would never do that to Ronan, and Ronan told him that if Adam was so perfect in Gansey’s eyes, then maybe Gansey should be the one fucking him. Gansey and Noah hung their heads and finally gave up and drove back to Henrietta, crushing defeat a heavy weight on their shoulders.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last bit of lyrics from the song _You'll Be Safe Here_ by Rivermaya. I really love that song.


	17. Everything Has Changed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone gets settled, finally.

When Ronan told Gansey and Noah that he didn’t give two fucks about what kind of trouble Adam had gotten himself into, it hadn’t exactly been a lie. He  _ didn’t _ give a shit if Parrish got himself into trouble. For starters, that asshole up and abandoned him and his band on what was supposed to be their night of triumph. For another, it wasn’t exactly Ronan’s fault that Tad Carruthers got his ass handed to him in front of Adam Parrish. Fucking dickhead knew he hated Kavinsky, knew he dated Parrish (maybe not before he saw them that night, but if Adam leaning against his shoulder, smiling nonsensically, with his eyes closed, wasn’t in fact an indication that they were together, Carruthers had to be either blind or batshit insane. Probably both.) And he still had the gall to shove the video up Ronan’s face. And of course, there was the fact that Adam had completely neglected to tell him that he wrote a song for Joseph fucking Kavinsky, and that someone had actually recorded them playing it together. After he should have been committed to Ronan’s band. That just wasn’t how friends who cared about each other worked. It didn’t matter what Gansey said, that it was just a song and not something drastic like Adam’s virginity or whatever. It was a betrayal all the same.

But not giving a shit about what trouble Adam Parrish was in was not the same as not giving a shit about Adam Parrish himself. It was the primary reason why Ronan moved back to the Barns and skipped school for the remainder of the term before spring break, only deigning to make an appearance when Gansey called his mother in exasperation to tell her that the school was going to drop her middle son if he didn’t show up for the term exams. Ronan holed himself up in the school library to cram so he didn’t have to see anyone, especially not Adam. He was sure Adam would be in the public library for his own studying because if he wasn’t working, Adam Parrish now camped out in the Henrietta public library to try to push his A+ into some magical grade that didn’t exist on the American schooling system. At least, that was what Noah said. Ronan did not try to find out if this was true—he had a hard enough time not staring at Parrish anymore when they landed in the three classes they had together to sit for exams together.

Now that it was finally spring break, Ronan thought he could breathe easily. Adam, according to Gansey, had pretty much given them the cold shoulder since Band Night two months ago. Noah had reasoned that Adam was too embarrassed by his own reaction to everything that had happened because the two of them were already back on pretty friendly terms. It was Blue and Gansey, and especially Ronan, that Adam avoided at all costs, Blue because she was probably angry at him when he’d snapped at her when she asked about cheating on Ronan, and Gansey just because he was Ronan’s best friend. He never showed at Monmouth again, not even to pick up his guitar when the whole Band Night fiasco was finally over, and he kept to himself along the Aglionby halls. None of them saw him on the Henrietta streets either.

So when Ronan stepped out of St. Agnes church after the early mass service on Easter morning to the sight of a barefoot Adam Parrish walking down the steps of one of the attic rooms that the church rented out, he was justifiably taken aback. It was just past 7am and Adam was in a thin shirt and sweatpants and holding an empty water container, making his way to the shared kitchenette of the St. Agnes church office.

“Parrish.” The word escaped his mouth before Ronan could stop himself.

Adam stopped walking and blinked, and turned around very slowly. It felt like a scene from a movie. He regarded Ronan with cool, sea blue eyes and inclined his head in Ronan’s direction. “Lynch.” He blinked again when Ronan didn’t say anything, and shrugged and started to turn away.

“What’re you doing here?” The words kept tumbling out of Ronan’s mouth without him ever intending for them to spill.

Adam frowned and half-turned back to face him. “I live here.”

It was nonsensical and idiotic and Ronan itched to find out more. “Finally got tired of the trailer park, have you?” he muttered snidely. Adam appeared not to have heard him.

In a perfect world, Ronan would have left Adam alone, and leave it at that: just a chance encounter between two people who were not meant to be together. His mother was probably waiting for him by the car. Matthew and Declan would be wondering what had gotten into him. Ronan was usually in a rush to get home so he didn’t have to linger on the street outside St. Agnes church because he knew Adam worked at the convenience store right across the street. But he would not be Ronan Lynch if he didn’t beat a dead horse just a few more times.

He caught up to Adam as Adam reached the water dispenser and filled his container up. He quirked a brow at Ronan’s face but did not say anything. Ronan felt like he was being subjected to the usual silent treatment he gave Gansey or Noah, and on any other day or any other place, he would have left Adam alone and nursed his anger and cursed Adam out for being a prick. But on Easter morning, with the sermon on redemption still lingering in his ears, his curiosity got the better of him and he opened his mouth again.

“I said,” and he raised his voice so Adam would be too embarrassed to pretend he didn’t hear him, “since when do you live here?”

Adam looked up from his water container, a little flustered, cheeks coloring just ever so slightly And Ronan resisted the urge to knock the dispenser over. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t hear you. Deaf out of that ear now. Beg your pardon?”

He frowned. Adam was deaf? “Since when couldn’t you hear me out of that ear, Parrish?”

“I don’t know, since you were too busy to care about what the fuck happened to me?” The bite in Adam’s answer was something he had come to expect at least. There was still too much bad blood. He hadn’t gotten over yet. Ronan wanted to rise to the bait but Adam shook his head suddenly, as if to clear his thoughts. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”

Now it was his turn to frown. Since when did proud, stubborn Adam Parrish apologized for being mean to anyone, and especially to Ronan Lynch, who by now, everyone knew had triggered his panic attack in the band night concert back in January? Adam continued to talk.

“I moved after Band Night. Filed for emancipation after I lost my hearing.” Adam shrugged at Ronan’s shocked expression. “I got beaten up when I got home. I can’t remember what it was about. Curfew maybe, or someone saw us...” He shrugged, like it didn’t matter to him either way.

“What happened to your ear?”

“Conductive loss of hearing. You know how it is.”

Ronan certainly knew the kind of damage Robert Parrish could inflict on his son for the smallest infraction. It was why, he knew, Adam had reacted the way he did when Ronan punched Tad Carruthers. Ronan knew it and yet he still punched Tad. He knew how Adam’s anxiety exploded into full-on panic attack at the first sign of danger, at the sudden flurry of movement, even when none of this was directed to him. And Ronan hadn’t done anything to stop himself. He’d rationalized for months that Adam got what he deserved.

“Sorry,” he said softly. He meant it too.

Adam shrugged and smiled. Ronan had to wonder how he could smile over all of it. Adam had lost his friends, he’d lost the music, lost the band, and now, he’d also apparently lost his hearing. And yet he could still smile at Ronan. As if he’d forgiven him.

“Not really your fault. It’s whatever.” He moved to walk back to the stairs behind the office. Ronan didn’t moved to let him though. Adam stopped and looked at him strangely. “Your mom’s waiting.”

Ronan scowled. He was angry. So angry with Adam and himself because how could Adam just stand there and look so fucking normal talking to him? Ronan, who had triggered his panic attack, who had gotten his friends to turn on Adam, who had probably been the cause of Adam getting completely wiped the night he got home from Band Night? How could he stand to look at him like he hadn’t caused all the bullshit in Adam’s life in recent days?

“I kind of need to get back upstairs now,” Adam said, smiling again. “I have to work in an hour.” The smile turned deprecating. “Those Aglionby school fees aren’t going to pay themselves and—“

“Do you have a lawyer for this?” Ronan suddenly blurted out, still scowling at the way Adam kept smiling at him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, I didn’t think I’d need one. Turning eighteen in a couple of months anyway.”

It occurred to him that for all the intensity of their fly-by-night relationship, Ronan had never exactly found out when Adam’s birthday was, or even how old Adam was. Adam looked at him strangely when he still didn’t move out of the way.

“Did you want to talk to me about something?”

Talk, Ronan thought, was fucking overrated. He wanted to yell at Adam, rattle his teeth at why he wasn’t angry at him, why he didn’t hate him, why he was still smiling after all the months they had existed without so much as looking at each other. Maybe it was only Ronan who hadn’t been looking.

“We can talk upstairs?” Adam offered. “My feet are cold and my toes are about going to fall off.”

He snorted but he finally let Adam pass. As he stalked after him, he saw glimpsed Matthew from the courtyard giving him a thumbs up sign. Declan was ushering their mother to the Volvo. They’d evidently seen Adam too, and now they would take care of their mom. Ronan could take care of himself for now. He followed Adam to the tiny room above the church and contemplated quietly what it was exactly that he wanted to say. Adam stood by the door to let him pass and Ronan looked around.

The room was tiny and bare and it was so ugly, it caused Ronan physical pain to see it. He had never been in Adam’s room in the trailer park, but this place was somehow uglier than that. He didn’t know if it was the stack of plastic bins that contained Adam’s things neatly stacked on the far corner of the room, jutting out slightly from the wall because of the way the ceiling sloped. It could be the small pile of text books by the sagging Ikea mattress, each book meticulously marked with differently-colored Post-It markers that Ronan recognized as probably coming from Gansey’s desk. These books were Gansey’s books and that meant Gansey lied and was probably on speaking terms with Adam Parrish if Adam had his books in his room. Maybe it was the sight of the scratchy, threadbare bedsheets that Ronan couldn’t imagine would have kept Adam warm even in the crisp spring evenings, much less during the winter. There was a rickety desk at another corner, next to a tiny oval window with the pane pushed open, and because Ronan barely fit into the tallest part of Adam’s room and he didn’t want splinters on his Sunday suit if he sat on the floor, he moved to the dinky steel chair by the desk and pushed the mess of notebooks and pencils on the desk so he could lounge against it.

Adam stood by the doorway, keeping the door open, and folded his arms across his chest and looked at Ronan expectantly. “So talk.”

Ronan frowned up at him, annoyed that he remained standing even though there was logically nowhere else to sit except on the sad excuse for a bed, and he knew Adam wouldn’t let himself sit lower than Ronan because he never wanted to be the one looking up, especially not to an Aglionby boy as Aglionby as Ronan Lynch.

“Aren’t you going to close the door?” he demanded, mirroring Adam’s posture, and crossing his arms across his suit jacket. He knew he cut a mean figure, like a mafia lord with his razor sharp features and cold eyes, but Adam was not intimidated, and although he hunched forward the tiniest bit, he didn’t move from where he stood, and instead leaned his head back on the door looking tired.

“I don’t quite trust myself around closed doors with you,” Adam said quietly. Ronan found that he was unable to stop staring at the smooth line of freckled tan skin of Adam’s neck. He didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed that his hair had gotten longer as well, and curled messily over his brow in dirt-colored wisps.

Ronan grinned nastily at him. “Thinking you’re going to jump me before I get the chance to say sorry?”

Adam shrugged, the action delicate on shoulders as thin as his. His collarbones jutted off the thin fabric of his shirt and Ronan swallowed indelicately and wondered why he was looking at these things now.

“Maybe,” Adam said, but finally, he pushed off the doorway to sit on the bed and cupped his chin on both hands.

The door creaked shut slowly. Ronan ignored it in favor of staring at Adam’s down-turned lips. He didn’t know where to start talking. Sorry would be nice, but Ronan Lynch did not say sorry to anyone.

“Are we going to talk or are you going to just stare at me until I have to leave?” Adam asked finally, losing patience for their staring match, but not moving an inch. This was so fucking awkward and not for the first time, Ronan wished he could just grab Adam and shake him and yell at him, kiss him… something!

“Fuck,” he finally muttered, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Adam nodded. His sandy hair flopped all over his narrow eyes and he gusted a breath upwards but it didn’t get rid of the hair flopping over his face. “Yeah, fuck.”

In that tiny, ugly room where the gables of the ceiling sagged with the weight of Catholic guilt, and the paint peeled and the cold draft of the remnants of winter still lingering, Adam Parrish was still the most beautiful thing Ronan had ever seen. If he didn’t say anything now, it would be final. The real end to their friendship. He wasn’t quite sure that was what he wanted, even though he’d spent the past three months convincing himself that was for the best between them.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, okay.”

Adam’s eyes snapped open, like he hadn’t expected the rush of words that exploded out of Ronan’s mouth. “What?”

“I mean,” Ronan hesitated, then shook his head, stood up, hit his forehead on a low-hanging beam, swore loudly and irreverently, and continued. “I mean, I’m sorry. For…” He gestured vaguely across him as he started pacing in front of Adam who was craning his neck backwards to stare at him, and Ronan thought he glimpsed peach fuzz at Adam’s jaw and fuck, what he would give to nuzzle to the feel of his stubble right now. Did Adam really have to look fucking sexy as hell while he was trying to apologize? Fuck fuck fuck.

“I’m sorry, what?”

Ronan stopped pacing. There was a bemused smile on Adam’s face as he leaned back on the bed, his elbows bent behind him to continue propping himself up so he could look at Ronan better.

“What?” Ronan parroted back, annoyed that his train of thought was interrupted.

Adam’s smile widened smugly. “You just asked why I’m looking sexy has hell while you’re trying to apologize.” He laughed when Ronan stared at him, scandalized that he had actually verbalized his thoughts. “For the record,” Adam said, still snickering, “I’m not trying to seduce you by having you up in my room or anything.”

He glared at him witheringly and it only seemed to goad him more. “Thanks, Parrish. I think between the two of us, I’ve always been the one who could keep it in my pants. And between the two of us, who’s in bed now looking all fucking pouty and come-hither? Fucking cross your legs together around me, Parrish.”

“I’m just saying!” Adam laughed, sitting up now, and then reaching up to tug at Ronan’s sleeve. He obligingly sank to the floor, but the scowl on his face didn’t ease. Adam moved one hand to cup Ronan’s cheek, his expression suddenly soft. “It’s not your fault,” he said quietly. Ronan couldn’t help but lean into the warmth of his elegant hand. “That I was conditioned that way.” Then he sighed. “But you didn’t have to hit anyone over anything. It’s one song, Ronan. I never did anything with Kavinsky. Ever. You have to know that. You have to believe that.”

He closed his eyes and turned his head so he could press his lips to Adam’s palm. He smelled like gasoline mixed with spring morning frost. “I know.”

Adam sighed again, restless this time, his thumb tracing mindlessly against Ronan’s jaw. “Noah told me you’d react that way. I didn’t listen.” When he laughed it was a dagger pointed to himself, and Ronan opened his eyes and caught his hand just as Adam tried to take it back.

“It doesn’t matter what Noah said.”

“It matters to me, Ronan. I could’ve, I don’t know.” He looked away, his hand not in in Ronan’s grip curled to a fist. “I could’ve told you about it.”

“Yeah, you could have,” he agreed. “But you didn’t need to.”

The silent addition of  _ Because I don’t own you _ hung heavy in the air. Neither of them spoke after that, though Ronan did not let go of Adam’s wrist, and Adam didn’t struggle to push him away. They were both sorry and they both knew it, and while it had taken them all this time to finally get it out, Ronan was glad that they did and he quirked as smile up at Adam.

“So does this mean I’m getting laid?” His eyes danced wickedly as the smile widened to his trademark sharp-edged grin.

Adam smiled back, soft and radiant and so fucking beautiful Ronan had to force the choked off confession that threatened to bubble up his throat. “Buy me flowers and say sorry like you mean it first, asshole.”

He pushed up to his feet and offered Ronan his hand. He took it and pulled himself up. This time, Adam didn’t stumble.

When Ronan reached for the door to let Adam get back to whatever he had been intending to do before he had interrupted, he smiled again. “If I do, will you put out on the first date?”

Adam rolled his eyes as he grabbed his towel. “Fuck off, Lynch. I need to get to work soon.”

* * *

 

Later that night, as Adam trudged back to his apartment, mind blank from exhaustion, thoughts bleeding and fuzzy, he noticed an odd shaped bundle at the foot of his door. He bent to pick it up, and it was a single long-stemmed white rose wrapped in colored cellophane. On each outer petal, sketched lightly with a black Sharpie, were letters that spelled the word “Sorry”, and tucked in the middle of the bud was an unopened packet of condom and on the packet was another note in tinier text that said, “Fucking put out, Parrish.”

Adam didn’t know whether he was going to be severely amused or mortified that Ronan would actually leave a condom in a church. Shaking his head, he palmed the condom, slipped it in the back pocket of his jeans, smelled the rose appreciatively, and laughed quietly as he let himself in. There would be plenty of time for that, he was sure. No doubt, Ronan would be barreling through the door in a while, demanding that they fully appreciate his gift by actually using it. But for now, Adam needed a shower.

  
  



	18. Epilogue: Love Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-script for Soundtrack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The actual story ended Chapter 17. This is just gratuitous porn, I suppose. Also, upped the rating because of this chapter.

The summer heat was particularly unbearable at the end of an outdoor gig. Ronan picked at the neck of his muscle tee as he ground a final riff, grinning as Adam yelled his parting goodbye to the crowd and they both retreated backstage, arms slung over each other, casual and easy like they were old friends. Playing an opening to the summer gig felt a bit like Coachella, with the Aglionby prep school boys in summer casual that made Blue laugh at how many pairs of boat shoes she could point out from up the stage, Gansey’s included, and the easy crowd of local school kids with wild flower blooms in their hair and red cups in their hands.

Blue had the same wildflower crown in her hair for the show and she was picking one off now and shoving it into Gansey’s mussed coif, before he pulled all of them into a massive five-person hug. They laughed with the exhilaration of finally playing their first full show: six songs, with three originals. The crowd cheering them off the stage still rang in Ronan’s ears as they pulled off each other, not at all minding the sticky sheen of each other’s sweaty skin.

Post-performance hugs were something Blue and Gansey started when they first started playing public again, a month after Adam and Ronan made up. It was easy to pick up where they left off in the music, but reintegrating into band dynamics was a bit more complicated, with Adam feeling overly awkward for all of the things he’d said and done to everyone, most especially to Blue. Little by little though, Gansey’s easy friendship, Noah’s exuberant personality, and Blue’s irrepressible grin brought him back to the group until they were all finally comfortable with each other again, until Adam no longer froze when someone threw their arms over to him, until he stopped flinching when Noah jump-tackled him every time he got off the stage, until he would only blush when Ronan rasped into his good ear about how hot he looked all sweat-sheened and flushed as they retreated from the stage.

“Great show,” Adam rasped now, bumping fists with Gansey and Noah as he pulled away from their octopus hug. His voice was still hoarse from singing all night. Ronan couldn’t tear his eyes away from the way Adam dragged the cold condensation of the water bottle that Blue passed him across his forehead.

Fucking hot was what it was. Adam was a great show all his own. Ronan’s mouth, previously dry from singing along to Adam onstage, felt way too full of saliva at the sight.

“My arms are killing me,” Noah laughed as he gripped his drumsticks between his legs and rotated one arm lazily, shaking out a crick in his shoulders in the same fluid action.

Blue laughed as she pushed her flower crown up a bit higher in the mess of clips in her hair. “You’re savage is why.”

“Fucking monstrous,” Ronan agreed airily, accepting the same water bottle from Adam and pouring the remainder of its contents into his mouth before the stage attendants were coming and shooing them off the backstage as the next band playing started to setup their equipment.

They moved a bit more slowly then, still soaking in the exhilaration of the crowd, as they started to tidy up the cables and instruments, dismantling Noah’s drum set, sorting through Ronan’s amps. Most of the amps went into Gansey’s car, the guitars and keyboard into Ronan’s, and Noah’s kit into his Mustang. The pack-up was always tedious backbreaking work, but Ronan loved every part of it: this was his dream, his band, and they were all finally together again, and even though Noah was graduating in the next few days, they wouldn’t lose him to college just yet when he confirmed that he would stay in Henrietta to continue playing.

Once they were all packed, Gansey put his arm around Blue, and grinned at his friends. “Anyone else staying? Blue and I want to try the rides.”

Adam made a face as he stretched lazily, his damp, sweat-soaked t-shirt riding up, treating everyone to a glimpse of the tan skin of his abs that Ronan was sure no one else but him noticed. Ronan swallowed as Noah flashed him a cheeky grin. Adam didn’t appear to notice. What a fucking tease. Ronan couldn’t tear his eyes away from the strip of tan, freckled skin. Before the band night fight, he and Adam have messed around some, but always in the dark, always at night and always in his car, but since they made up, they hadn’t really had an opportunity to be together as they worked towards rebuilding the band, and then Adam focusing on work and school as finals also drew near. Ronan felt a little like a man lost in the desert and seeing an oasis of cool, clear water for the first time.

“Gansey, I’m pretty sure only Blue will ever fit into any of those rides,” Adam said, one hand running through the dirty blond locks plastered to the side of his head and wiping the sweat off the back of his neck.

Gansey only shrugged as he and Blue started to turn away. “Don’t wait up,” he said, throwing Ronan a knowing look.

Noah, who had settled into a crouch next to his car, also got up. “I’m staying too. I spy a little birdie who wants to play.” He grinned cheekily, his eyes far off into the distant fairground.

For a while, Ronan couldn’t see who he was smiling at. He didn’t know Noah had been dating anyone. To be fair, for half the time he didn’t know what Noah had been doing in his free time because Ronan had been busy working out their music, and when he wasn’t doing that, he spent most hours outside of school at the Barns. He’d moved back to Monmouth already, since he and Adam made up, but he hadn’t spent a lot of time there beyond sleeping and he felt a little guilty that he didn’t spend more time with Noah to find out what he’d been up to.

Adam smiled at Noah though, like he knew things better than Ronan did. “Swan, huh? Didn’t think I’d see you dating one of  _ them _ .”

Ronan stiffened, and then relaxed. No, Adam may have been talking about the Dream Pack, but he hadn’t been seeing anyone of them since they got back. It was still curious, though, how he knew instantly who Noah was talking about. Just now, Ronan thought he finally glimpsed Swan’s tall, lanky form weaving out of the crowd, trying to act casual as he waited at the edge of the fair ground entrance. He was one of the few Aglionby boys still in uniform, and Ronan guessed he was probably in detention before he drove to the fairground to watch them perform, to watch Noah play.

Noah grinned. “Oh, we’re not dating. He just happens to have shit I like at the moment.”

Both Ronan and Adam groaned at the innuendo as Noah shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and started back towards the fairground.

“Guess you guys’ll be having some alone time after all,” he called as a parting shot, before he joined Swan and disappeared into the crowd.

Adam laughed ruefully, shaking his head, before drawing close, one hand slipping into Ronan’s as he leaned up and kissed him. “Guess we better make good use of that alone time, then?”

Ronan only laughed as he tossed his keys in the air and caught them. “Yeah, I guess we better.”

They drove back in companionable silence. Adam sat back in the passenger seat, eyes closed, a soft smile ghosting over his lips. Ronan stole glances at him between traffic light stops, loving the way the red, amber and green washed over his delicate features. Occasionally, Adam would crack open one eye, blue glittering in amber streetlight, his smile would get wider almost imperceptibly, and then he leaned back again into his seat, eyes closed in utter contentment.

They didn’t unload the equipment from Ronan’s car when they arrived at Monmouth. There would be plenty of time to do that later, when Blue and Gansey and Noah came back. Ronan felt a thrill of excitement hum through his veins as Adam followed him up to the apartment, and into Ronan’s room.

The moment he closed the door behind him, Adam launched himself on him. Ronan staggered back, surprised at the onslaught but smug as Adam pinned him against the door, mouth hot on his, one hand behind his neck, the other shoving into the back pocket of his jeans to pull their bodies flush together before wedging his thigh between Ronan’s legs and grinding up to make sure Ronan knew exactly how he wanted to spend their alone time together.

“Fuck,” he exploded, eyes rolling back into his skull as Adam pressed wet kisses up his jaw, behind his ear, and then down the long white column of Ronan’s neck. His hand traveled up and tangled in the mess of dirty blond locks, tugging slightly when the leg between his ground up purposefully and Adam pulled back.

“Hey,” he said, and he sounded breathless, his voice raspy, barely above a whisper, the warm air of his breath ghosting over Ronan’s jaw. Adam withdraw his hand from Ronan’s pocket and he opened his eyes reproachfully, but Adam was smiling at him as he pulled something out of his own jeans pocket and held it up to Ronan. “Remember this?”

It was the condom packet he had sent him the day they made up over two months ago at the start of spring break. The plastic packaging reflected the gleam in Adam’s eyes as he grinned up at him.

“Yeah?” Ronan said, his own lips twitching into a smile.

“Yeah,” Adam breathed, before kissing him again, slower this time, taking his time and dragging out the feeling as his empty hand slid up Ronan’s shirt, tugging until Ronan pulled back to peel it off. Adam tossed the condom onto the bed and pulled off his own shirt.

It felt a little bit like worship, the first time they touched that wasn’t needy and urgent and insistent and hidden away in a darkened parking lot or the side of the road. Ronan traced the constellation of freckles that sprayed delicately over Adam’s shoulders, back and chest. His body was unevenly tanned in the areas where his clothes didn’t cover his skin, and pale beneath the cover of his pants and boxers and Ronan followed the trail with his mouth, down the planes of Adam’s chest, the concave dip of his stomach. He kissed along the trail of dark blond hair from Adam’s navel, sucked marks on the cut of his hips before lavishing attention at that one straining spot that Adam needed him the most, and Adam mewled and keened and gasped at every kiss and touch, his blunt nails digging into the tattooed skin of Ronan’s shoulder blades.

Ronan pulled back when Adam bucked at the feeling of teeth and then sank back into the bed, his hands groping blindly for the condom.

“In my other pocket,” he panted, as Ronan got up and made short work to kick off his own clothes.

It wasn’t difficult to find the packet of travel lube in Adam’s jeans and Ronan had to pause before he moved back to the bed because the realization of what Adam wanted hit him with a blinding shudder of lust, and for a moment, he thought he only saw white and he needed to restart his brain before he was crawling over Adam’s supine body. He hiked Adam’s legs up, to find an angle that would work, and then took an agonizing amount of time trying to tear the packet of lube open with clumsy fingers, until Adam took the package from him and ripped it open with his teeth, and then he was keening again as Ronan moved a slick finger up his opening, his eyes wide, legs shaking, and Ronan looked down on him questioningly, suddenly uncertain.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Adam said softly, spreading his legs wider as the discomfort of the first intrusion turned to pleasure.

“Fuck,” Ronan replied, slicking a second finger and sliding it up, pressing tenderly until Adam adjusted.

It wasn’t long before a third finger was added and by this time, Adam’s hips moved to the cadence of Ronan’s fingers thrusting up his body, ragged moans pulled from his lips as he hiked his elbows up, seeming at first to want to sit up to reach Ronan to kiss him, and then sliding back down, hands fisting in the sheets as Ronan quested. Adam’s body was heat and sweat and gasoline and unbearably tight and Ronan didn’t know if he would last long enough because just having his fingers in him was enough to make him painfully hard and dripping pre-come as he found the spot he was looking for and Adam bucked again, his eyes snapping wide and then rolling shut and this time, he gripped Ronan’s hand stilling him.

“Now, Ronan, now.”

He moaned again as Ronan pulled his fingers out, grappled with the condom wrapper for a bit before he managed to roll it on, and then Ronan was rocking into the warm, tight heat as Adam bore his body down on him. When they moved, it was waves crashing to shore, a filthy string of curses leaving Ronan’s mouth as Adam rocked up to meet him with every thrust and roll of his hips. It was Adam’s soft cries when Ronan reached between them to pump him in time with the thrusts, as he leaned up to kiss wherever he could reach Ronan’s face and neck and shoulders. It was Ronan biting down on Adam’s neck as he felt himself draw close, and Adam’s keening cry as his body shuddered and he spilled white hot liquid between them, the spasm contracting almost painfully around Ronan and everything was bleeding in his vision, white and hot and searing. It was everything Ronan had been waiting for and finally received.

He collapsed on top of Adam, exhausted, and made a face at the stickiness of Adam’s stomach and chest.

“This will never not be gross,” he muttered as Adam groped for the blanket and wiped both their bodies down. Ronan glared at him balefully. “I just washed that, you asshole.”

Adam grinned as he pushed Ronan off. He was probably slowly suffocating him with his dead weight. “Then just wash it again.”

He moved languidly, swinging his legs off the side of the bed. Ronan watched as he stood and puttered around for a towel. There was still a bit of moisture dripping down between Adam’s legs and he was suddenly seized with the disgusting desire to lick it off, but he pushed it back down as he flopped back into his pillows, finally sated.

“Wake me up when you’re done with your shower.”

“Yeah,” Adam said softly. He looked a little unstable on his legs, like a newborn colt, and Ronan decided he was really the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“Yeah,” he replied back, closing his eyes.

It was perfect.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic is borne out of a conversation about playing Guitar Hero (which I suck at), and male vocals singing Britney Spears. I’m in love with the idea.
> 
> Also, OMG, please, if you haven't, read the original TRC gang makes a band AU, Finding That Love Song, because it's a fandom staple.


End file.
